


sea glass mirror lost in the gambling prairie

by eneiryu



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:13:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 50,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28193019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: "Get me out," the werewolf promises, "and I'll getyouout."
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Nolan/Theo Raeken
Comments: 50
Kudos: 93





	sea glass mirror lost in the gambling prairie

**Author's Note:**

> If I had to pick two words to describe this fic, they would be _self-indulgent_ and _experimental_. That latter because everyone is a little _more_ in this fic. Theo is a little more ruthless. Nolan is a little more vulnerable. Liam is a _lot_ angrier. 
> 
> Two additional content notes:
> 
> In previous fics, I've implied that I think Theo has a history of using himself (including his body) as a tool for his work for the Dread Doctors--that becomes explicit in this fic. Both parties to that transaction are consenting, but (at least to Theo) it _is_ transactional.
> 
> Second, Nolan's (past) relationship with Gabe in this is nowhere near healthy. It's implied that it only became that way after the Anuk-ite came onto the scene, but there are discussions of it, and a specific interaction between Gabe and Nolan in the story that leaves bruises. I'm going to drop an explanation of exactly what happens in the end note for those who don't want to risk reading it without knowing.
> 
> Take care of yourselves, folks.
> 
> My thanks to [snaeken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snaeken) and [ExtraSteps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraSteps/pseuds/ExtraSteps) for the original _what if_ musings that led to this story, for beta reading, and for general cheerleading.

Schrader is in the middle of interrogating the captured werewolf when Nolan comes downstairs.

That’s probably what he’d call it, anyway, but Nolan’s pretty sure that he’s got the electricity turned up too high to allow the werewolf to speak: Nolan can see how tightly the werewolf has gritted his teeth even from across the room. He stops at the bottom of the stairs, caught, and just stares. There’s something happening in his chest but he can’t tell if it’s satisfaction or guilt or fear or _what._ He swallows, and noisily.

The werewolf’s eyes snap to his, because right as he’d done so, Schrader had suddenly lowered the electricity. Nolan’s breath catches in his chest as he realizes that the werewolf must have heard his throat work _._

But he can’t focus on that. Schrader realizes he’s there—following the werewolf’s attention, maybe—and snaps, “What, Nolan?”

Nolan startles backwards and nearly trips over the concrete steps behind himself. “Um,” he stammers, his eyes flicking between Schrader and the werewolf. “Um, Monroe said—”

Schrader makes an expectant, irritated face. The werewolf looks away from Nolan as his head lolls; Nolan can see him panting in these big, uneven breaths as he apparently tries to recover. 

As he _heals._ Nolan has to fight back a shudder.

“Nolan!” Schrader barks.

“She wants you upstairs!” Nolan finally manages to squeak.

A muscle in the corner of Schrader’s jaw jumps. He turns to glare back at the werewolf. “Looks like it’s your lucky day,” he sneers. He starts stripping off the thick rubber gloves he’d been wearing, and throws them down on top of the car battery whose trailing wires lead directly to the metal fence that the werewolf is secured to. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t go anywhere.”

Nolan’s breath catches when the werewolf just deliberately rolls his head upwards with a smart-mouthed smirk. “I’ll be here,” he drawls, easy and pleasant and like he hadn’t spent the last several hours being tortured. That muscle in the corner of Schrader’s jaw jumps _harder._

He bites off a harsh, pissed-off noise and stalks across the room towards the stairs. When he shoves past Nolan he really _shoves_ past him; Nolan stumbles into the concrete wall hard enough that he can feel his palms scrape on the rough surface, and his wrists twinge as he catches himself. He spends a few seconds just huddled against the wall, breathing through the sudden rush of adrenaline in his system, and when he looks up, the werewolf is back to watching him.

Nolan _freezes._

But he also doesn’t look _away._ _Can’t,_ really. His eyes run over the werewolf’s chest, the ragged remnants of his shirt. He’d been _shot_ several times, Nolan remembers hearing. When some of the others had finished tracking him down, he’d been sitting in his truck and they’d _shot_ him.

But besides the blood staining the edges of what are _clearly_ bullet holes in the werewolf’s shirt, there’s no sign of any injury. The werewolf’s skin that Nolan can see is smooth, unmarked; well-defined with muscle. 

“See something you like?” 

Nolan _jumps_ hard enough when the werewolf speaks—still in that same lazy drawl—that he all but slams _himself_ into the concrete wall. He cracks his head accidentally against the concrete, and so his head is ringing a little when he glances helplessly up to meet the werewolf’s gaze, the werewolf having tipped his own head back against the fence behind himself so that he’s staring at Nolan through heavy-lidded eyes. His mouth—bloodstained at the corners—is curled up in what even _Nolan_ can recognize as a suggestive smirk. 

“Um,” Nolan stammers. He can feel color _flooding_ his cheeks.

The werewolf cocks his head. _His_ eyes run over _Nolan’s_ face. 

His nostrils flare.

“Oh, you _do,_ ” he breathes, and the smirk on his face widens into something much less _suggestive._ He tips his chin in an obvious invitation—baring his throat in a way that probably isn’t an accident—and shifts a little against the fence. It causes the muscles of his captured arms and chest—Nolan seeing the latter through his shredded shirt—to ripple, and flex. “C’mere, then.”

Nolan doesn’t move.

In _either_ direction: closer to the werewolf, or back up the stairs, which is where he _should_ go. He just keeps staring. The werewolf’s eyes narrow thoughtfully, and his gaze runs over Nolan’s face, searching and studying. He shifts again, this time widening his stance like he’s trying to relieve an ache from being stuck in the same position for too long. 

It causes Nolan’s attention to drop between his legs, where he can see just the _slightest_ bulge in the werewolf’s too-tight jeans. Nolan swallows again.

But then his eyes drag upwards, and _snag_ on the werewolf’s mouth. His teeth beyond his bloodstained lips look human, and blunt, but Nolan finds himself squinting at them, trying to spot _any_ hint of sharpness; of fang. Theoretically the electricity should be up too high for the werewolf to be able to shift at _all,_ but. Nolan feels _fear_ slither through him as his imagination immediately fills the werewolf’s mouth with fangs.

With the _Beast’s_ fangs.

“Oh,” the werewolf suddenly breathes, Nolan seeing his lips move before he really registers the sound. “ _I_ see. So that’s what it is.”

He opens his mouth wider, and deliberately touches the tip of his—very pink—tongue to the edge of one of his upper teeth. He scrapes it along the others, Nolan’s eyes helplessly following it and his breath starting to come a little shorter. 

And then the werewolf closes his mouth with a _click._ When Nolan jolts and looks up at him, he’s back to smirking suggestively through those same, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Unfortunately your friend left the electricity up a little too high for me to shift,” he explains apologetically, though the smirk never leaves his mouth, “ _but._ ”

Nolan holds his breath. The werewolf smirks wider.

“But if you come _lower_ it,” the werewolf concludes, nodding towards the car battery controls,”I’d be _happy_ to show you what big teeth I have.”

Nolan feels _fear_ bolt through him at the same time that _something else_ does, too. Something hot and squirming and that has the werewolf’s nostrils flaring again and his gaze sharpening, something _intent_ replacing the lazy drawl. 

“C’mon,” the werewolf cajoles softly, Nolan having to lean forward some to hear him over the sound of the machinery of the warehouse, and the others stomping around and yelling at each other upstairs, and his own too-fast breathing. Of the electricity _buzzing_ through the air and the werewolf’s body. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

This time when he shifts there’s no denying the way that he’s deliberately drawing Nolan’s attention to that space between his legs. He cants his hips a little forwards. There’s _no_ mistaking his meaning.

Nolan’s breath catches again and it takes him an _embarrassingly_ long time to look away. But: “You must be crazy,” Nolan manages to blurt out. “No way.”

The werewolf seems undeterred. He shifts again in a way that _could_ be natural, or accidental, but causes his hips to roll up against the empty air in front of himself as he resettles. _Stop that,_ Nolan wants to say, but he can’t unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

“You sure?” The werewolf just checks, shrugging his shoulders in a way that draws Nolan’s attention _back,_ towards where the werewolf’s _hands_ are secured to the fence. His _clawed_ hands, or _could-be_ clawed hands— _would-be_ clawed hands—if it weren’t for the electricity. Nolan wonders what they look like. Closer to Scott’s, or the Beast’s?

Nolan wants to say _absolutely._ In his dreams he says something equally smart-mouthed back, equally suggestive and smooth and _suave_. But upstairs, someone yells and there’s a sound like the slam of a door or an automatic rifle being dropped on a metal table, and what comes out of his mouth instead is:

“They’d kill me.”

It comes out on a whisper. Nolan realizes with a jolt that Schrader could come back at _any time_ —that _anyone_ could wander down here and see him talking with the werewolf—and he panics. He turns around, and starts to _flee_ back up the stairs.

“ _Wait,_ ” the werewolf calls.

The teasing is gone from his voice like someone had stripped it chemically clean. Nolan freezes on the steps, one hand on the railing, and twists to look at him. The expression on the werewolf’s face is intent, fixed; serious. He holds Nolan’s eyes.

He tells him, “I’ll get you out.”

“W-what?” Nolan stammers.

The werewolf shifts again but it’s not a suggestive movement. It puts him more on his feet, _planting_ them strongly into the earth, and it expands the muscles of his chest, some. Nolan drags his eyes back up to the werewolf’s, his breaths coming short and shallow and unsatisfying.

“You want out,” the werewolf concludes, firm and unyielding and like a statement of _fact_. He tips his chin at the room around them—the _warehouse_ around them—and, Nolan realizes, everyone—and Schrader, and Monroe, and Rossler and Preston and the rest—inside it. His eyes never leave Nolan’s. “You’re more scared of them than you are of me. You want _out._ ”

 _Terror_ ices over Nolan’s lungs, his heart. When it starts to melt it sends fear slip-sliding into his veins. “I-I don’t… _You_ don’t…” He tries to argue.

“Nolan,” the werewolf interrupts, murmuring it softly out, and for a moment Nolan jolts and wonders _how did he…?,_ but then he remembers: Schrader had said his name. The werewolf waits until Nolan’s looking back at him and then he flares his nostrils. He says, “There’s no point in lying to _me._ ”

 _Oh no,_ Nolan thinks. His fingers spasm around the edge of the railing. He looks desperately back at the werewolf.

The werewolf who just repeats, “I can get you _out._ ”

“Out _where?_ ” Nolan demands, before he can stop himself. “There’s nowhere to—”

“Out of _here,_ ” the werewolf just interrupts, “and isn’t that all that you really want?” He tips his head back against the fence again, but it’s a shrewd look, not a suggestive one. “One step at a time, Nolan.”

Nolan’s still frozen halfway up the stairs. He flicks his eyes upwards towards where he can hear Monroe and the others talking, and making _plans,_ and loading and loading and loading all their guns, and their crossbows, and their other weapons. He looks back down at the werewolf.

“I can get you out,” the werewolf simply repeats. He searches Nolan’s face. He promises, “Get _me_ out, and I’ll get _you_ out.”

Nolan hesitates halfway up the stairs for a few seconds longer. He glances up again. He glances _down_ again. He makes a decision.

He moves.

\---

Doing as Theo promised, and getting Nolan—and therefore _himself_ —out is just _laughably_ easy.

 _Amateurs,_ Theo sneers mentally, one hand wrapped around Nolan’s upper arm to guide—to _drag_ him, really; he keeps stumbling—through the warehouse, and towards the exit. Back in the basement as Theo had been zipping Nolan’s hoodie—handed over without complaint when Theo demanded it—up over his bloodstained and shredded shirt, Theo had ordered Nolan: _just keep your eyes on the ground, okay? And if anyone asks, I’m a new follower that you recruited from the school._

Nolan had looked like he was going to throw up. Theo had paused in the middle of flipping the hood of Nolan’s hoodie over his head, and then he’d decided: _maybe let me do the talking._

But it ends up being wasted preparation. Nolan doesn’t keep his eyes on the ground, his gaze darting nervously around as they snake their way through hallways, and big open rooms filled with oblivious wannabe hunters, and past open doors with _more_ wannabe hunters— _what the hell is going on,_ Theo wonders, but shoves it aside because _one goddamn problem at a time_ —and he never stops looking like he’s going to be sick. 

But no one stops them.

They push through the doors into the parking lot and Theo doesn’t even slow. “Which one’s yours?” He demands.

“Um,” Nolan stutters. “Um, that one.” He points towards a red crossover, but when Theo goes to drag him over towards it, he suddenly digs in his heels. “Won’t they—won’t they _know?_ ” He whispers, looking at Theo through _wide_ eyes.

“Know what?” Theo shoots back. “Are you a prisoner here? Not allowed to leave?”

Nolan hesitates a fraction of a second before shaking his head. _That’s interesting,_ Theo thinks, but doesn’t say. 

Instead he says, “Then we’ll be fine.”

Monroe—because that’s who’s clearly in charge here, Nolan’s heart _skipping_ when he’d said her name earlier—would probably figure out eventually that Nolan had helped him escape, but it wasn’t a _guarantee_ : Theo had deliberately forced Nolan to turn off the electricity so that he could break _himself_ out of the zip-ties, rather than having Nolan cut him loose. He’d turned the electricity back up on his and Nolan’s way out.

So he’d bought them a few hours, probably, but that doesn’t mean he wants to stand around debating it in the parking lot of what is _clearly_ Monroe’s headquarters. He keeps dragging Nolan towards his crossover, and then demands his keys when they get there. “Get in,” he barks, when Nolan hesitates, and he’s already inside with the engine started by the time Nolan scrambles around and climbs into the passenger seat. He twists around with one hand braced on the back of Nolan’s headrest, and gets them reversed out of Nolan’s chosen spot and on the road.

There’s no sudden shouting from behind them. No amateur hunters spill out of the warehouse to follow them. Still, from the way Nolan’s lungs are working in short, shallow bursts, he’s about to hyperventilate.

“Hey,” Theo says, sharp only to get Nolan’s attention and then immediately softening his voice when Nolan startles and looks over at him. “I need someplace to clean up. Where can we go?”

Nolan’s breathing starts to slow as he frowns thoughtfully. The pounding of his pulse starts to ease as the request distracts him. Finally he ventures, “My…house?”

Theo squints at him. “Your parents aren’t going to wonder who the hell I am?”

Nolan hunches in on himself a little. He says, very quietly: “My mom isn’t really...home, all that much.”

 _Also interesting,_ Theo concludes, but files it away for later. He shakes his head. “Still, too risky. Somewhere else.”

Truthfully he doesn’t _need_ Nolan to tell him anywhere: he knows exactly where they’re headed. But the problem keeps Nolan focused, and distracted, and the riot of his scent slowly calms—Theo’s ability to _tell_ that the riot of his scent is slowly calming filtering back in as he heals more and more—as he frowns down at his hands, and keeps proposing places. 

All too _public_ places: all too easily guessed. The high school locker room. The community center. Theo dismisses each one but _gently,_ even as he’s inwardly marveling that this kid has survived this long at all; he’s got the self-preservation instincts of a kicked puppy. _How the hell did you end up in that snake pit?_ Theo wonders, side-eyeing him, and then he finishes pulling them into a gas station and into one of the parking spots in front of the station itself, rather than any of the pumps.

“Um,” Nolan stammers, flicking a confused look at Theo. “I don’t… I have half a tank?”

“Not why we’re here,” Theo demurs, and then twists around so that he can dig around the backseat. _Yahtzee,_ he thinks, as his fingers brush the rough nylon of what is clearly Nolan’s gym bag; Theo could smell the sweat-and-plasticky stink of it even underneath Nolan’s own terrified scent. He yanks it out, and into his lap. “C’mon,” he orders, and shoves open his door.

The station has an attached bathroom. Technically it’s locked—Nolan mumbling an offer to go purchase something so they can get the key—but Theo just puts one hand on the handle, and presses _down_ until the mechanism gives. He gets his other hand wound in the back of Nolan’s shirt—Nolan having startled away from him, wide-eyed—and throws him inside before following him through, and shutting the door behind himself.

He lifts the strap of Nolan’s gym bag over his head, and lets it drop at his feet in front of the sink. He unzips Nolan’s borrowed hoodie and lets it fall on top of the bag, and then grips the hem of his ruined shirt and strips it over his head.

On the other side of the bathroom, Nolan sucks in a sharp breath. Theo glances over at him already smirking. 

But while arousal is _there_ in his scent—same as it had been back in that warehouse basement when Nolan had been staring, and staring, and staring at him—it’s threaded through, _inseparable from,_ the fear, and anxiety, that’s also there. Nolan’s eyes on Theo’s chest are fixed, and focused, but more on the dried _blood_ marking his skin than the ridges and planes of his muscles. _Looking for the bullet holes,_ Theo realizes.

Terrified that he isn’t finding them.

Theo spends a few more seconds studying him, and then he turns back to the sink. The paper towel dispenser is empty—probably perpetually—so Theo wets his ruined shirt under the tap, and starts scrubbing his chest and arms and face clean. Every few passes he has to stop, and wring blood and dirt and whatever else had accumulated on his skin from the fabric.

But finally he’s as clean as he’s going to get. He balls up his ruined shirt but instead of throwing it into the big black trash can in the corner he drops it at his feet; he’d take it with them when they left. No need to leave evidence behind if he didn’t _have_ to. He braces his hands on the sink, and gives himself a critical once over.

He looks over at Nolan when Nolan’s breath starts to stutter, once more short, shallow; not enough air to actually keep him upright and conscious for long. Nolan’s eyes flick up to his as Theo’s head turns, and Theo can almost _see_ what he must be thinking, the delayed panic: _what the hell have I done?_

He remembers hearing Nolan say: _they’d kill me._

 _We don’t have time for this,_ Theo thinks, frustrated, but then he forces it down. He considers.

He makes a decision.

“C’mere,” he murmurs, soft and low and soothing, though Nolan probably doesn’t fully clock his tone. He also doesn’t give Nolan a chance to comply, or not to comply: he leans sideways and hooks two fingers in one of Nolan’s belt loops, and starts dragging him gently, but firmly, over until he’s standing wedged in between the sink and Theo’s body, Theo kicking aside Nolan’s gym bag to make room. 

Nolan’s eyes blow _wide,_ his hands immediately finding the edge of the sink behind himself and wrapping around it, like he needs the support. “W-what are you doing?” He stammers.

Theo just drops his other hand to join his first, and starts working on the button and zip of Nolan’s jeans. He grins at Nolan, sharp and suggestive. “I made you a deal, didn’t I?” He reminds Nolan as he gets the button undone, and the zipper pulled down. “I told you I’d make it worth your while if you got me out.”

Nolan doesn’t move to stop him, but he also shakes his head a little wildly. “That wasn’t, that wasn’t the deal,” he protests breathily. “You—you said if I got you out, you’d get _me_ out. That—” his eyelashes flutter a bit, probably because Theo had shifted his palm to press and then _rub_ the heel of it lightly against Nolan’s rapidly-hardening cock, “— _that_ was the deal.”

Theo makes sure to give this _visible_ consideration, and then he shrugs. He leans forward just slightly so that he can skim his nose across Nolan’s own, his lips just _barely_ brushing Nolan’s as he murmurs, “Consider this a bonus for a job well-done, then.”

But then he pauses, lifting both hands away from Nolan and waiting until Nolan looks at him in confusion to ask, “You want me to stop?”

Nolan stares at him for a few seconds, and then he shakes his head. “No,” he breathes. 

Theo grins, and finishes dipping his hands into the slit at the front of Nolan’s boxers to pull him out. 

Nolan _moans,_ and then immediately slaps a hand over his mouth to stifle the sound; Theo has to lean briefly back to avoid it. His hips immediately buck up into Theo’s grip. _Christ,_ Theo wonders, studying him. _How wound up_ are _you?_

The answer is apparently _very._ Nolan’s whole body goes stiff with tension, his knees immediately starting to shake and his breaths turning into these little huffs that Theo can feel against his own mouth, his cheeks; his face still close to Nolan’s. Theo moves a little closer so that he can pin one of Nolan’s hips to the sink with one of his own, genuinely afraid that Nolan might _fall over_ if he doesn’t. 

_Is he even going to be able to come like this?_ Theo finds himself genuinely wondering; Nolan so stiff and his residual anxiety _burning_ in Theo’s nose. Theo fights the urge to grit his teeth: it’s either this, or he knocks Nolan out and _carries_ him unconscious back to the car. 

And he _far_ and away prefers this. He ups his efforts.

“C’mon, Nolan,” he murmurs, making sure to _breathe_ it against one of Nolan’s ears, Nolan instantly _shivering_ at the skate of air over his sensitive skin. “You can do this,” Theo coaxes him. “C’mon.”

Nolan still has his hand over his mouth, but his eyes _drag_ over to Theo’s, and fix there, hooded and dazed. Theo looks straight back, and keeps working his hand over Nolan’s cock, twisting on the upstroke and catching the precome leaking from the tip to slick it back down. Nolan’s eyelashes flutter again and his eyes roll up some as he gives a long, low moan, his hips pressing up into Theo’s working grip. 

“That’s it,” Theo encourages, tipping his head forward so his nose skims across the back of Nolan’s muffling hand. “That’s it, Nolan. Just like that.”

The muscles of Nolan’s abdomen start to tighten. His legs start to shake even _more._ _He’s about to come,_ Theo realizes. _Thank god,_ he thinks with an irritated rush of relief, and then he frowns lightly as he realizes something _else_. Letting his expression go briefly dry, he swallows a sigh, and then shifts around so that he and Nolan are once more directly facing each other, and then he crouches down.

He doesn’t go to his _knees_ —not on this fucking floor—but he sits back on his haunches so that his mouth is level with Nolan’s cock. He’s about to lean forward to swallow Nolan down when above him, Nolan suddenly sucks in a sharp breath and then Theo feels a hand on his forehead, stopping him.

“Y-you don’t,” Nolan tries, even as his hips are still _bucking_ desperately in Theo’s grip.

Theo just makes sure to give him as suggestive a smirk as possible, and leans forward—pushing past Nolan’s less-than-effective restraint—to press his mouth to the side of Nolan’s cock as he points out, “Well it’s either this, or you make a huge mess of the clothes you have to wear out of here.”

Nolan’s eyes _widen._ He apparently hadn’t considered that. “B-but…” he stammers.

Theo just smirks at him again. “Job well-done, remember?” He says cheekily, and then he deliberately ignores whatever Nolan does—or tries to do—next, and leans back just _enough_ that he can lean back forward, and swallow Nolan down. 

Nolan immediately bucks. Theo rides it out without issue, but still: he brings both hands up, and _pins_ Nolan’s hips back against the sink. He takes him deeper as Nolan _moans—_ the sound once more muffled; he’d slapped one or both of his hands back over his mouth—and then he really starts to bob his head. 

It’s over fast after that.

Theo pulls back once Nolan’s mostly stopped twitching through the aftershocks of his orgasm, and then gently pushes him aside as he stands, and then bends over the sink to spit. He turns on the tap and spends a few seconds rinsing out his mouth, Nolan’s shuddering, panting breaths audible over the sound of the rushing water. Finally Theo turns off the tap, and straightens up.

Nolan is staring at him through wide, stunned eyes. But he’s staring at _him_ —at his face, and what Theo is sure is the swollen red of his mouth, even as his healing kicks in to erase it—and not at his chest, and the phantom bullet wounds he seems to keep trying to find. 

_Yahtzee,_ Theo thinks, and has to smother a satisfied smirk.

Instead he reaches forward, and starts getting Nolan’s softening cock tucked back in his boxers, and his pants zipped and buttoned back up. Nolan gasps and his eyelashes flutter and his hips give a helpless buck, but he doesn’t protest or even try to help.

He does, however, when Theo goes to move away—reaching for Nolan’s kicked-aside gym bag for a new shirt—suddenly reach out, and put a tentative hand on Theo’s arm. Theo twists his head back around to look quizzically at him. Nolan swallows, and then flicks his eyes down to Theo’s admittedly hard cock where it’s bulging out his jeans.

“Don’t you, um,” he ventures tentatively. “Um.” He winces, and then—Theo watching in surprise—seems to shake himself a little, and when he opens his eyes and looks back up at Theo, he’s wearing what Theo is pretty sure is _supposed_ to be a copy of one of Theo’s suggestive smirks, but which is wobbling too hard to pull it off. “I can return the favor,” he offers. “I’ve, um—” and _now,_ he stumbles, his pulse skipping and his scent _souring,_ “—gotten a lot of practice, recently.”

Theo’s eyes narrow. When Nolan had said he’d gotten a lot of practice recently his eyes had cut away, his cheeks flushing. But not a _good_ flush, Theo doesn’t think; an _anxious_ flush. His fingers still on Theo’s arm spasm slightly.

 _Huh,_ Theo thinks.

He smooths out his expression, and replaces it with a sharp-mouthed smirk. He straightens back up, and then purposefully _crowds_ Nolan back until he ends up pressed back up against the sink with a barely audible _oof_. 

“Tempting,” Theo tells him, and skates the tip of his nose over Nolan’s again. He meets Nolan’s eyes and makes sure to smirk wider as he says, “But we’re on something of a clock, here.” Then, remembering Nolan’s too fast-breathing, the way his panic seemed to operate on a time-delay, he adds, “Something to think about for later, though, huh?”

Theo can see the distraction take hold, Nolan’s pupils dilating. He nods rapidly, his eyes dropping to Theo’s mouth. 

Theo feels something twist _hard_ in his chest, and he jerks back, and only _just_ manages to turn it into a step back towards Nolan’s bag. He rips open the zipper a little harder than fully necessary, and roots around until he finds a clean shirt. He yanks it on.

Nolan is still leaned back against the sink even though Theo’s no longer pinning him there. But his baseline pulse is steadier. His breathing is deeper; more even.

“C’mon,” Theo tells him, and picks up Nolan’s bag, and his ruined, damp shirt. “Let’s go.”

“Wait!” Nolan suddenly calls. Theo flicks his eyes heavenward on a bitten-off sound, and then twists his head back to look at Nolan over his own shoulder. Nolan swallows, but stammers, “I don’t even know your _name_.”

Theo feels his expression slacken some with surprise. He _stares._

But. 

But they’re on something of a clock, here. He forces an easy smirk onto his face, and tells Nolan, “Theo. My name’s Theo.”

\---

Nolan runs his eyes over the textured plastic of the glove compartment in front of his knees. It’s weird as _hell_ to be sitting in the passenger seat of his own car while the werewolf—while _Theo_ —gets them back on the road, and headed _somewhere._

 _Ask him where,_ Nolan orders himself, but he can’t get his tongue to unstick itself from the roof of his mouth. He darts a look over at Theo, but Theo isn’t looking at him. His eyes are on the road. His mouth is pursed in a thoughtful moue, one finger—his left elbow braced on the door—tracing absently over his lips.

Nolan _flushes,_ and looks immediately back down.

 _A bonus for a job well-done,_ Theo had said, his fingers pulling Nolan’s cock from his pants and, later, into his mouth. Nolan fights back a shudder but it still comes out as a shiver, his whole body still feeling languid and loose and a little alarmingly elastic, like the sudden release of tension had left his muscles and joints overstretched like old rubber bands. He scrubs damp palms against his pants, and sneaks another look at Theo.

 _Ask him where we’re going,_ that irritating voice in his head pipes up again. Nolan chews his lip. 

Theo must spot it. “What, Nolan?” He demands, but idly. He glances over.

Nolan freezes, color flooding his cheeks. “Um.” Theo’s eyebrows climb. There’s traffic around them, but not much, and anyway Theo seems to be perfectly in control of the car and aware of the other vehicles around them no matter that he’s looking at Nolan, and not the road. _Another part of being a werewolf?_ Nolan wonders, and then he blurts out, “Where are we going?” before he loses his nerve.

Theo snorts a little, and finally looks back forward. He checks his left blindspot and then changes lanes, Nolan’s car leaping faster forward as Theo apparently puts his foot down on the gas. “We’re getting the hell out of Dodge. A specific _where_ can come after that.”

Nolan frowns. _Getting the hell out of…?_ His eyes widen: Theo means Beacon Hills. Panic bolts fast and hard down Nolan’s spine. “B-but—!”

Theo’s head whips back around to look at him at the same time that his nostrils flare. _He can smell it,_ Nolan realizes. _He can smell_ me.Nolan fights not to recoil. Still, he has to swallow once and then again before he can squeeze the words out past his tight throat as he says, “She’s watching the roads. The—the major highways. She has people watching them.”

Theo watches him through narrowed eyes for a few long, dragging seconds, and then he bites off a pissed-off noise. “Why the hell didn’t you—” He half-snarls, and then abruptly changes lanes, back towards the right-hand shoulder. Nolan—who’d cowered back a little against his seat at Theo’s sudden show of temper—yelps a little and slaps out a bracing hand to steady himself.

And then his head jerks up—Theo’s doing the same—because there’s the sudden sharp blare of a siren behind them. Nolan twists to look at Theo but Theo’s staring at the rearview mirror. The look on his face is _hard._ His eyes are narrow.

“Maybe it’s not for us,” Nolan stammers. Theo shoots him an unreadable look.

“Let me,” he orders, even as he’s pulling Nolan’s car fully onto the shoulder, and stopping, “do the talking.”

Nolan swallows, and jerks a nod. Even still it feels like every muscle in his body has gone taut again. Theo must be able to sense it, because he suddenly drops a hand around Nolan’s thigh. His fingers curl inward around Nolan’s leg, tight and with his fingertips digging lightly in. It’s grounding, somehow; Nolan feels his breath start to come a little easier.

At least until there’s a knock at the driver’s side window.

Theo’s fingers spasm tighter around his leg—for a moment Nolan’s sure he feels a slight _prick_ where his fingertips rest, even through his jeans—and then he reaches over, and lowers the window. He looks out at the deputy standing outside and smiles, sharp and clearly insincere.

“Problem?” He wonders.

The deputy doesn’t look impressed. “License and registration,” she orders.

Nolan starts to scramble to pull out his wallet from his pocket, and his car’s registration from the glove compartment, but Theo doesn’t move. “Haven’t heard of that particular traffic violation,” he points out mildly. 

The deputy’s eyes narrow. _What are you doing?_ Nolan wonders desperately, but then the woman speaks. “This car was reported as stolen.”

“What?” Nolan blurts out, before he can stop himself. The deputy’s attention snaps to him even as Theo’s fingers are tightening warningly around his leg. Nolan flinches, but then he hurries to offer over his license and registration as he explains, “No, it’s—it’s my car, see?” He holds both documents out more insistently. “It’s not stolen, it’s my car.”

The deputy hesitates—her eyes flicking back to Theo—and then she slowly reaches forward, and takes Nolan’s license and his car’s registration. She glances down at both, and then back up. “Wait here,” she orders, and turns around to head back to her cruiser.

Nolan holds his breath until she’s out of sight, and then turns back to Theo, fully prepared to apologize. But Theo’s looking fixedly out of the windshield, his expression distant. He murmurs, “She’s smarter than I gave her credit for,” and then, when he looks over and apparently spots the way that Nolan’s brow furrows: “Your friend Monroe.”

Nolan’s eyes widen as he realizes what Theo must mean. “She knows,” he breathes.

“Not necessarily,” Theo dismisses, looking back out through the windshield. “It’s just as likely I broke out on my own and took you as a hostage.” His voice becomes more distant as he adds, apparently to himself, “She doesn’t know anything for sure.”

And then _his_ brow furrows, and his head cocks. 

“What is it?” Nolan whispers.

“It’s McCall,” he says slowly, and Nolan realizes with a jolt that he’s _listening in on the deputy behind them_. “He’s at the station. I can hear him in the background. Him and—”

He cuts himself off, but something spasms across his face. He suddenly removes his hand from Nolan’s leg, and it’s only _then_ that Nolan sees that his fingertips had been _clawed_. _What…?_ Nolan wonders, but he doesn't get a chance to chase the thought down any further: the deputy reappears at the window.

With her _gun_ drawn.

“Out of the car,” she orders, her stance staggered and balanced and her gun held low, but with the threat of it clear. Nolan _freezes._

Theo just flicks the deputy a lazy look. “All this for a car that isn’t even stolen? Seems extreme.”

“It’s not about the car,” the deputy denies. Her gaze is hard. “Sheriff Stilinski wants to talk to you, _Theo Raeken._ ”

Nolan feels all the color drain from his face. His head snaps around so that he can stare at Theo. _Who the hell_ are _you?,_ Nolan wonders, _dread_ starting to curl up his spine. 

Theo just smirks, and raises his hands next to his shoulders. Once there he reaches down to release his seatbelt, and then uses that same hand to reach carefully over, until he can pop the handle of the car, and open his door. He steps out, hands still raised. 

“W-wait,” Nolan starts to panic, leaning forward to better see it as the deputy reaches forward, and gets Theo spun around and shoved _hard_ up against the side of the car as she holsters her weapon, and reaches for her cuffs instead. “What about—”

But the deputy cuts him off. Her eyes aren’t exactly friendly. “You’re coming with us,” she tells him, one hand between Theo’s shoulder blades to hold him against the back of the car. It doesn’t seem to _matter_ that Theo could break out of the cuffs holding his arms behind his back, or that the gun near the deputy’s hand means next to _nothing_ to him. Theo just stays where he’d been put, a sharp little smirk on the part of his face that Nolan can see.

Nolan stares. “What?” He stammers. “What, why would _I_ have to…?”

The deputy just hauls Theo off the side of the car by the back of his— _Nolan’s,_ technically—shirt, and then holds him there as she looks back at Nolan. “The Sheriff’s wondering why you’re with him,” she answers, giving Theo a meaningful little shake. Her voice is hard. “He’d like you to help him understand.”

Nolan just stares at her, frozen.

“ _Out,_ ” she orders, when he apparently doesn’t move fast enough for her tastes. “Take the keys out of the dash, get out, and then hand me the keys.”

She holds out the hand that isn’t gripped tight around the back of Theo’s shirt. Nolan flicks a desperate look at Theo—silently begging _do something_ —but Theo just looks back, his lips curled up in a sharp little smile. He makes no move to do _anything,_ let alone help Nolan.

So Nolan carefully reaches over, and gets his hands on the keys. He rolls up the driver’s side window that Theo had lowered—he doesn’t want his _car_ to get stolen while it’s stuck here on the side of the road, he thinks, a little hysterically—and then steps slowly out of the car. He rounds the hood, and extends his hand hesitantly out, until he can drop his keys in the deputy’s hand.

She closes her fingers immediately around them. “Let’s go,” she orders, and gestures Nolan ahead of her.

Ahead of her and _Theo,_ who stumbles along in front of the deputy when she gives him a meaningful little shove, but who never loses the sharp smirk on his face.

Nolan swallows, and forces his gaze away.

\---

The Sheriff is in the middle of some furious argument with Scott and a handful of his ragtag band of misfits when the deputy finishes hauling Theo and Nolan into the station. 

He stops when he sees Theo, though.

“Theo Raeken,” he observes. “Once again, _you_ pop up in the middle of everything going to hell. Why,” he continues, his voice going _hard,_ “am I not surprised?”

Theo has to drag his gaze back to the Sheriff from where it’d immediately, _automatically,_ slid to Liam standing just behind Scott’s shoulder. “The difference is,” Theo points out as he meets the Sheriff’s gaze, “I haven’t actually _done_ anything this time.”

The Sheriff’s eyes narrow. “Maybe not _this_ time _,_ ” he counters, smooth and low and a _warning._ He opens his mouth—no doubt about to start doling out orders to the deputy still holding Theo by his upper-arm—when he’s interrupted.

“ _He_ has, though,” Liam says stonily, jerking his chin at— _Nolan,_ who cowers back. Liam flicks his gaze sideways so that he’s looking at the Sheriff and Scott as he tells them, “He’s with _her._ With Monroe.”

There’s a specific acidic burn to Liam’s scent in Theo’s nose that shouldn’t be there; not if Nolan was just another of Monroe’s wannabe hunters. Theo finds his head cocking as he studies the hard-edged look on Liam’s face.

Still: “No, he isn’t,” Theo counters, and smirks as infuriatingly as he knows how when everyone’s attention snaps to him, including Nolan’s. “Not anymore, at least.”

Scott’s brow furrows. Malia and Lydia exchange a confused look. But Theo barely pays attention to them, because he’s too busy paying attention to _Liam._ Liam glares back, his nostrils flaring. His eyes narrow. Theo smirks _wider._

“Think of him as a political refugee,” he advises. Then, flicking his attention to Scott instead: “You like those, don’t you?”

The Sheriff glances at Scott. “Do you know what the hell he’s talking about?”

Scott shakes his head. “Not really.” He turns to look at Liam, whose jaw just tightens. 

The Sheriff blows out a rough, frustrated breath. “Well, one problem at a time,” he declares. “Murrow, put Raeken in holding with the other two. Mr…?” He prompts, looking expectantly at Nolan, but when Nolan doesn’t reply—looking too deer-in-the-headlights to, really—it’s Liam who ends up filling in _Holloway_ in an overly-neutral tone of voice, “Holloway can take a seat, right there, and _not move._ ” 

He nods towards the bench sitting just outside his office. The bench with the metal _bar_ running underneath it, meant for attaching handcuffs to. The implication is clear. Nolan goes pasty, and nods jerkily. 

“C’mon,” the Sheriff murmurs to Scott, already on the move back towards his office. “Let’s figure out what to do with your _other_ refugee.”

Murrow yanks on Theo’s arm, a clear order to follow as she starts heading deeper into the station. Nolan tries to catch Theo’s eyes and Theo lets him. He can practically _see_ the betrayed message there: _you said you’d get me out._ Well, Theo _had,_ hadn’t he? Maybe Nolan should have been a little more specific in where he wanted out _to_. 

He smirks, and lets himself be led away.

Led away and then thrown into an already-occupied holding cell. Theo cocks his head as he studies the other two werewolves—because they _are_ werewolves—as he leans back, hands pressed against the bars of the cell to let Deputy Murrow unlock and then remove the handcuffs from his wrists. He ignores her as she leaves, one hand coming up to wrap around his wrist as he rubs away the last of the feeling of the handcuffs chafing against his skin.

“And who the hell are you?” He wonders.

But it turns out he doesn’t _need_ the two werewolves to tell him who the hell they are, because circumstances intervene: Monroe and a baker’s dozen of her amateur hunters show up outside of the station and provide the answer. 

“You two,” Theo realizes, slumped loosely back against the wall, his legs stretched out along the bench seat in front of himself; outside he can hear the Sheriff trying to negotiate with Monroe, “killed hunters.”

“They killed our _pack,_ ” the smaller one snarls, her eyes—her _blue_ eyes—flashing. Theo had already been smirking but now he smirks _wider._

In the corner of the room, the red indicator light of the security camera blinks steadily on.

Still, Theo’s surprised enough that he actually has to put some effort into covering that fact up when Liam suddenly rushes into the room, a little white card in his hand. He slides it through the reader and then yanks open the cell door. 

“C’mon,” he orders Theo, shooting the two werewolves a warning look.

Theo thinks about challenging him, about demanding _come where,_ but in the end he climbs to his feet and heads for the open cell door. He tosses a triumphant look at the two werewolves as he goes, and has to smother a laugh when the smaller one _snarls_ at him, fang-mouthed and furious. He finishes exiting the cell and stands patiently waiting while Liam slams the door back shut, the locking mechanisms reengaging with a harsh, metallic _thunk._

He looks at Liam once that’s done and raises his eyebrows expectantly. Liam just grabs his wrist, and starts _hauling_ him back out of the room, towards the main body of the station.

But halfway there he suddenly stops, his spine going rigid. He whips around to look at Theo, his nostrils flaring, and then all at once he suddenly surges forward to shove Theo back and through a nearby doorway. Theo goes only because he’s too surprised to do anything else.

They end up in a bathroom. Liam slams the door shut behind himself as he follows Theo through, and then turns back around to face Theo. His nostrils flare again, and this time Theo can see his whole _chest_ expand with how deep a breath he takes. Liam’s eyes fall shut as he does it.

When they open back up, his expression is _incandescent_ with rage. Theo feels his heart rate kick up and his breathing start to speed as that look sends adrenaline slip-sliding through his veins. 

“You,” Liam realizes, his voice low and burring and half a growl, “had _sex_ with him.”

 _Oh,_ that’s _interesting,_ Theo thinks, and now _excitement_ starts to join the adrenaline flooding his system. He cocks his head thoughtfully and adopts as studious an expression as he can.

“I’m not sure I’d consider a handjob and half a minute of oral as sex,” he counters, and has to fight back a _grin_ when Liam’s upper lip curls in a snarl in response, “but.”

Liam takes a step forward. Theo has to turn his reflexive step backwards—because he _does_ take a reflexive step backwards—into a casual lean against one of the bathroom’s sinks. 

“Why were you with him in the first place?” Liam demands, which is probably the part he’d _actually_ cared about, before he’d caught a whiff of Theo and had gotten sidetracked.

Theo rolls his eyes, and huffs. “Monroe’s people had me,” Theo tells him, and finds his attention sharpening on Liam’s face as something chases itself there-and-gone across it at Theo’s claim. He searches Liam’s expression, but can’t find any trace of what it had been. He shrugs, and explains, “I made him a deal.” 

Liam studies him, narrow-eyed. “What do you mean, Monroe’s people had you?”

“I _mean,_ ” Theo drawls, drawing out the words extra-obnoxiously in punishment for Liam being dense, “that Monroe’s people _had me._ ” He rolls his shoulders roughly, like he could shrug off the sudden remembered feeling of the metal grates of that fence digging into his back, his upper arms. 

Liam’s expression just tightens with annoyance. “Yeah, but how did they _get_ you?”

“Well,” Theo explains, insinuating and meant to _prick_ , “not all of us have _packs_ to watch our backs.”

But he miscalculates. But Liam just reminds him, “You _did_ have a pack,” softly and with absolutely no sympathy in his voice.

He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t _need_ to. Theo feels his jaw clench. Liam just keeps studying him.

“None of that explains Nolan,” he points out, his scent—his anger momentarily derailed—twisting back up; going hot.

If Theo listens he can hear Nolan’s rabbit-fast heartbeat out in the main body of the station, underneath the frantic, panicked murmurs of the Sheriff’s deputies and the more _righteous,_ but still panicked, murmurs of Scott and Malia and Lydia and some unknown third werewolf. Some unknown third werewolf who smells slightly _off_ in Theo’s nose, but he can’t pinpoint why. Liam is still glaring expectantly at him. It’s distracting.

“One of Monroe’s people was having some fun at my expense,” Theo finally tells him. “He wound up leaving me alone with Nolan, and I—made Nolan an offer.” Theo tips his head back slightly so that he’s looking _down_ at Liam through heavy-lidded eyes. He says, “He got me out, I got _him_ out.”

Liam scoffs. “Sounds more like you got him _off._ ”

Theo smirks. “I multitasked.”

Liam’s mouth starts to open, and Theo doubts it’s going to be a helpful observation. There’s still over a dozen people outside who want to kill them all. 

“He was terrified, Liam. And not of me,” Theo interrupts, cutting off whatever Liam had been about to say. “I needed him to calm down before he had a panic attack midway through our escape.”

Liam doesn’t answer right away. “Terrified, huh?” He finally murmurs. Then, his voice going _hard:_ “Not that long ago he was the one doing the _terrifying._ ” Theo finds his eyes narrowing as he searches Liam’s face. _What the hell did he do to you?_ He finds himself wondering again.

“People change,” he points out, more because he wants to keep _digging_ —he wants to see what other messy insides Liam might spill out—than because he actually believes the platitude. 

“Not everyone,” Liam shoots back, but it’s less an accusation and more—an observation. His eyes run over Theo’s face in turn. “This isn’t the first time you’ve done something like this, is it?” He realizes. “Made someone a deal. _Multitasked._ ”

Theo feels his jaw tighten as his teeth grit, entirely without his say-so. “Well, you know how it is. Not all of us can be true alpha’s betas. Some of us,” he says, “have to find other ways to survive.”

Liam recoils. But the sour note that starts to wend its way through his scent isn’t _anger._ The look on his face as he searches Theo’s is too pinched for that; too soft.

Theo doesn’t understand how he so entirely lost control of this conversation. He tips his chin back up. “I’m assuming this interrogation _wasn’t_ your original reason for pulling me out of that cell?”

That seems to snap Liam out of it a bit, but only a bit. He blinks, but his voice is still a little distant as he replies, “I—convinced Scott that if we let you out, you’d help us.”

Theo can feel his expression slacken with surprise. Liam’s tightens up in inverse proportion. “So?” He challenges. “Will you?”

Liam’s hair is longer than it had been with the Wild Hunt. He loses control of, alternatively: his expression, his scent, and his temper as quickly as he ever had back then. The difference: he gets all of them back under control faster, now. His gaze when he looks back at Theo is level, steady; unwavering.

 _People change,_ Theo hears himself say again. Maybe it hadn’t been such a platitude after all.

“Yeah,” Theo agrees, after a few long seconds have passed. “Yeah, I’ll help.”

\---

Nolan watches the deputy finish dragging Theo off to the holding cells, Theo still looking _alarmingly_ unbothered by the fact that he’s been arrested, and then he swallows and—withering under Liam’s glare, though Liam doesn’t say anything—he hurries over to the bench that the Sheriff had indicated, and huddles down onto it.

The Sheriff and Scott and Liam and the others disappear back into the Sheriff’s office. Nolan tries to close his eyes, and breathe through the absolute _panic_ chewing up his insides.

 _You never should have left,_ he berates himself, hunched over his knees and with his hands rising to tangle in and then _clutch at_ his hair. _You never should have accepted Theo’s—_ a _werewolf’s,_ what the hell had he been _thinking_ — _deal._ He squeezes his eyes shut, and curls a little more completely over his knees. 

_Monroe’s going to kill me for this,_ he realizes, and he nearly bites through his tongue trying to bite back the high, desperate sound he wants to give.

And then he looks up, because movement across the station catches his attention. Because _Vargas_ moving across the station catches his attention. It’s the first time he’s seen her in _days,_ but the _last_ time he’d seen her had been at Monroe’s warehouse. She’d been with another man in a deputy’s uniform and they’d been talking in low voices with Monroe. Nolan’s breath freezes in his chest. 

Vargas starts towards him.

But suddenly the door to the Sheriff’s office opens with a distractingly loud clatter—the shades on the door smacking against the glass—and Liam appears within the doorway. He reaches over and gets a hand around a fistful of Nolan’s shirt, and practically hauls him up before throwing him into the office. Even as he’s stumbling forward Nolan is twisting around to look at Vargas—Vargas and _the other deputy,_ the both of them now stood tight-jawed in the middle of the station floor—staring after him. 

And then Liam closes the door, cutting off his view. Nolan swallows, and flicks his eyes nervously upwards and around at Scott and the Sheriff and Lydia Martin and Malia Tate and another woman he doesn’t recognize all watching him through eyes that are varying degrees of narrow.

Scott’s eyes are probably the least of them, but they’re still guarded. Nolan wonders what Liam told him. His knuckles twinge with the sudden, unwanted sense memory of what it’d felt like to slam them against the hard edge of Liam’s cheekbone. He has to fight not to look behind himself, where he knows Liam is still standing.

It’s the Sheriff who finally speaks. He says, “Liam claimed that you’re with Monroe. Theo called you a political refugee.” He searches Nolan’s face, Nolan jerking to look at him. “So why don’t _you_ help us clear all this up, and tell us what exactly you are, and aren’t.”

 _I’m just Nolan,_ he thinks, a little desperately, and he _knows_ it’s helplessly naive, but. But he’s not like Schrader, or Vargas, or—or _Gabe,_ who’d probably heard by now that Nolan had disappeared off with a _werewolf._ Nolan sucks in a sharp breath as he realizes but it’s not _enough,_ so he tries sucking in another one, but that doesn’t work right, either. His vision starts to swim a little.

“Scott?” The Sheriff says, sounding alarmed. Scott’s nostrils when Nolan manages to drag his attention over to him are flaring, just like Theo’s had throughout the day; _he’s scenting me._

Suddenly there are hands on Nolan’s arms, encouraging him sideways. His knees hit something hard and he sits on what he subsequently realizes is a couch. He looks up at whoever had guided him over, and finds himself looking up at Liam. 

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out helplessly. Breathlessly, because he’s still not getting enough air. “I’m sorry, I never meant to—” He stammers. “Monroe, she—”

“So you were with Monroe,” the Sheriff observes, his voice carefully neutral.

Nolan stiffens, realizing what he’d given away. But Liam is still looking at him—Liam who’s crouched down in front of him, his hands still on Nolan’s arm from when he’d guided Nolan over to sit—and Nolan looks back. 

He admits, “Yes.” It’d been the Sheriff who’d asked it but it’s _Liam_ that Nolan confesses it to. Liam’s jaw tightens.

Above and to the side of Liam, the Sheriff presses, “But not anymore?”

Nolan stares at him for a few shaky, uneven breaths, and then he looks back down at Liam. “No,” he all but whispers. 

_Please believe me,_ he thinks. Liam just jerks his gaze away, and stands. 

Nolan doesn’t have to overanalyze it: the Sheriff takes Liam’s place crouched down in front of him. “Then I’m hoping you can help us.” He nods towards the unidentified woman. “She says she was attacked by a deputy.” _She’s a werewolf,_ Nolan realizes with a panicked jolt. “One of _my_ people,” the Sheriff insists, voice hard, “except now maybe one of—Monroe’s.”

The Sheriff searches Nolan’s face. Nolan can’t help searching his in turn, because there’s something almost like _desperation_ lining it. 

“So do you know,” the Sheriff asks, his voice cracking a little. “Did you ever _see—_ ”

But he doesn’t get the chance to finish his question. The station had been half-dark in the falling twilight but suddenly it fills with too-bright light, Nolan and everyone else in the room wincing and shading their eyes. The Sheriff surges to his feet, and hurries to the windows of his office to peer out. 

“It’s her,” Liam announces lowly, two hands braced on the window-sill as he stares out at whoever is outside. “It’s Monroe.”

The Sheriff jerks him back and away from the glass with a hand on his shoulder. “Get away from the windows,” he orders. “All of you.”

He hurries out into the rest of the station. Nolan can hear him talking with his other deputies. Vargas and the other deputy are out there. _I should warn him,_ Nolan thinks. _Get up,_ he orders himself, _and go warn him._

“Who’s that with Monroe?” Scott suddenly asks, but he’s asking it of Liam. His eyes are a bright, flared red as he squints through the blinds. 

Liam’s silent for a moment. When he grinds out, “Gabe,” it’s through gritted teeth.

Nolan feels all of the color drain out of his face. Almost as a unit, Scott, Liam, and Malia whip around to stare at him. But then Liam’s eyes narrow as he studies Nolan, though Nolan gets the feeling that Liam’s not really looking—not really _thinking_ about—him. He turns back to Scott.

“Let me get Theo,” he urges. Scott’s jaw clenches. “ _Scott._ We need all the help we can get, and he’ll help.”

Scott spends a few more seconds working his jaw, and then he glances back out of the window. “Go,” he orders. 

Liam goes.

Scott looks back at Nolan. “Stay _here,_ ” he instructs, and Nolan gives a jerky nod. Scott and Lydia and Malia head back out into the main body of the station. 

Nolan stays. He puts his head in his hands, and his hands on his knees, and he stays.

At least until the door bangs back open, and Scott and the others spill back into the office. Theo is with them this time.

“They’re after the two omegas in holding,” Theo says, and Malia snaps out _we know that._ “So _give them_ to Monroe, then.” He gives Scott an incredulous look. “They’re not even part of your pack!”

“We’re not doing that,” Liam snarls. 

Theo throws up his hands and reminds him, “You said Monroe only gave you all until _midnight._ ” The argument devolves from there. 

Nolan doesn’t know whether or not he should be trying to follow it. He can’t, in any case; it’s happening too fast and he doesn’t know half of what they’re talking about. He gives up, and twists around to look over his shoulder through the internal windows, out towards where the Sheriff is. _You should tell him,_ he thinks again, his eyes running automatically over the gathered deputies.

Except then his breath freezes in his chest, because—

“What is it?” Theo is suddenly there and demanding, a hand on his shoulder to force him around, so that he has to stare wide-eyed at Theo instead. “ _Nolan._ What is it?”

“Vargas and the other deputy are gone,” Nolan blurts out. Theo’s expression tightens up in confusion and then smooths _right back_ _out_ as he apparently puts together the pieces _far_ faster than Nolan would have expected; far faster than he should have been able to.

 _Who the hell are you?_ Nolan wonders again, but Theo is already twisting around and snapping, “Liam! The omegas in holding, they’re in dan—”

Liam’s eyes _widen_. He takes off through the Sheriff’s office door before Theo’s even finished. Scott takes off after him. 

Vargas and the other deputy—“DeWitt,” the Sheriff calls him, and Nolan’s pretty sure he’s _trying,_ but he can’t hide the betrayal in his voice—are stopped before they can poison the two werewolves— _the omegas,_ Nolan corrects silently, testing out the word—with the wolfsbane Monroe had apparently given them. 

The clock continues to tick, edging closer and closer to midnight. 

“What the hell are we going to do?” Liam mutters to Scott after, the group—the _pack_ —of them all standing around in a clump and staring down at the two handcuffed—former?—former deputies. The two omega werewolves— _what’s an omega,_ Nolan still finds himself wondering, helplessly curious even though now’s _really not the time_ —are still in holding, and Monroe and dozen others and _Gabe_ are still outside, waiting.

Nolan huddles a little closer to Theo’s shoulder. He can’t tell whether he’s surprised or not when Theo lets him. He’s _not_ surprised when Liam glances at him over Theo’s shoulder, his eyes narrow and searching and _hard_.

But apparently, the answer: they’re going to negotiate.

“ _Dad?_ ” Scott breathes, as an _FBI_ agent—and Scott’s father, apparently—suddenly appears on the scene, just as they’d all been about to run out of time. He cuts his way through Monroe and her gathered people with ease, and he steps into the station when the Sheriff opens the doors.

“I didn’t think you were going to show,” the Sheriff tells him, and from the look on Scott’s face: neither had anyone—Scott first and foremost—else.

But Scott’s dad had shown, and Scott’s dad _negotiates,_ and at the end of it all, Liam glares at anyone and nothing—the _universe,_ seemingly—and says, “This deal sucks.”

But Scott—but the _alpha_ —takes it. He and the rest of his pack stand just outside the doors and watch as Vargas and DeWitt are handed over to Monroe and her people. The two omega werewolves are escorted from the holding cell to a waiting FBI transport van. 

Scott, and all his people—his _pack_ —agree to leave town. Nolan stands with his back pressed _hard_ to one of the station’s interior walls, still hidden just to the side of the doors, and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Wait!” Someone suddenly demands, and Nolan’s eyes pop open. He can’t see outside— _I don’t care how curious you are, you keep_ away _from the goddamn windows,_ Theo had ordered him, and then he’d muttered to Liam, _I’m not sure they won’t shoot him_ anyway _if they see him_ —but he can hear the brief, muted sounds of a struggle and then Gabe—because it _is_ Gabe—snarls, “Where’s Nolan? I want _Nolan_ back.”

There’s a few ringing seconds of silence. Nolan can’t see Gabe but if he presses his shoulders even harder back against the wall and twists his head awkwardly around on his neck, he can see Theo through the open doorway. Theo’s expression takes on a particularly derisive edge.

He replies, “Who?” in a tone deliberately _meant_ to be grating, and dismissive, and completely uninterested. There’s another burst of sound as Gabe gives a wordless sound of fury, and—based on the scrape of what sounds like rubber shoes on asphalt—tries to fight his way forward. 

Theo just smirks.

Nolan just squeezes his eyes back shut, and drops his head back against the wall behind himself.

\---

The ramshackle house that Argent takes them all to could charitably be called a _cabin,_ but that’d be a very generous interpretation indeed. 

It’s also not the part that matters: “My father doesn’t know about this place,” Argent assures Scott quietly as he’s unlocking and then shoving open the door, and Scott gives an exhausted, acknowledging nod.

There are a handful of rooms inside, offshoots of the main area split between a collection of ragged furniture and a cramped kitchen. Scott spends a few seconds dividing everyone up. He pauses when he gets to Corey, who looks pale-faced and a little shellshocked, Mason left unwillingly—even if temporarily—behind, but he doesn’t get the chance to true alpha his way through the situation. Lydia suddenly leans sideways to bump Corey gently with an elbow, and ask him, “You mind keeping me company tonight?” It’s _blatantly_ transparent but that doesn’t seem to matter: Corey gives her a wobbly, grateful smile, and nods.

Scott looks at Theo next and Theo doesn’t even have to _guess_ what’s coming. “Watch him,” Scott orders Liam in a low voice that he’s not even _trying_ to keep from carrying.

Liam doesn’t protest. He _does_ tip his chin at Nolan, huddled behind Theo’s shoulder with his eyes downcast. “What about him?”

Scott searches the top of Nolan’s head for a few seconds, and then blows out a rough breath. “Watch him, too,” he instructs, and then he leaves Liam to go and help Argent with something. 

Liam meets Theo’s eyes, his expression unreadable, and then he jerks his head sideways, towards their assigned bedroom. “C’mon,” Theo mutters, reaching back without looking to grab Nolan’s arm, and direct him stumbling forward. 

But once they all get settled, _watching_ Theo and Nolan turns into a group effort: Argent calls everyone back to the main room to plan. Theo knows what’s coming even if Nolan doesn’t, so he settles back into the frayed, lumpy cushions of the armchair he’d chosen and just stretches out his legs, loosely crossing them and his arms as he waits for Argent to say:

“Nolan,” low and quiet and spooked-animal gentling. Nolan _still_ startles, and hard enough that the chair he’d chosen—hard-backed, and even _that’d_ been an ordeal, Nolan about to sit on the floor before Scott had firmly, if gently, redirected him—scrapes a few inches along the ground. 

Nolan stares at Argent through wide, wide eyes. “...yes?” He finally ventures, when the silence has stretched past its breaking point.

Argent looks calmly back. “Tell us,” he requests, “about Monroe.”

It’s a kinder interrogation than Theo had been subjected to but it’s still an interrogation. Argent probes and presses and doesn’t let Nolan shy away, latching onto details that Nolan doesn’t want to give—“I don’t know,” Nolan stammers at one point, “I tried never to go _near_ the armory”—and relentlessly drawing out bits and pieces of plans and politics that Nolan himself hadn’t even known he’d known. 

_He pays attention, I’ll give him that,_ Theo thinks idly at one point, his eyes heavy-lidded as he slouches back in his chosen chair. It’s been _days_ since he’s slept properly and longer since he’s been able to do it anywhere other than his truck, and the sudden wealth of space available to him feels like a luxury that he finds himself reveling in.

Still, it’s also the reason that he misses coming to his own defense when Liam suddenly offers, “Theo and I can do it.”

Theo comes fully awake for the first time in a _while_ at that. “I’m sorry, what?” He demands, but the decision has already been made: he and Liam will attempt to draw Monroe’s band of wannabe hunters away from Beacon Hills, while Argent, Scott, Malia, and Lydia search Monroe’s—and Gerard’s, the line of Argent’s jaw tight, tight, tight—headquarters.

“Alright,” Argent declares, bracing both hands on his knees and pushing himself to his feet. “Everybody get some rest. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”

“Hey,” Theo snaps—though quietly—as everyone is splintering off to their various rooms. His fingers around Liam’s forearm are probably too tight but Theo doesn’t _care._ “What the hell did you just volunteer us for?”

Liam just rips his arm free. “Sorry you’re going to have to worry about saving someone else’s life other than your own for once,” he hisses, which is _patently_ unfair: the McCall pack would have gotten to _bury_ Liam in the aftermath of the Wild Hunt if it wasn’t for Theo, but Liam doesn’t seem to remember or care about that. He gives Theo a sharp smirk and recommends, “Think of it as the only way to save your own ass, if that helps.”

He stalks away towards their room. He’s not really _watching_ Theo—or Nolan, who’s trying and failing not to stare wide-eyed at Theo, his eyes drawing there-and-away like magnets—as ordered, but. Theo stares after him, narrow-eyed, and then he flicks his gaze sideways, to Nolan. “C’mon,” he mutters, and then he shoves himself upright.

There’s only one bed in the room and it’s tiny. Any one of the three of them would be able to fit on it, but only _one._ Nolan makes a sudden beeline for a corner of the room and Theo catches his arm, and not-exactly-gently redirects him towards the bed. Nolan stumbles into it and catches himself on the mattress with his palms, and then twists around to look in confusion—and not a little _apprehension_ —at Theo. Liam stands off to the side watching; he’d been pulling musty-smelling blankets and variously flat and lumpy pillows out of the room’s closet, as instructed by Argent.

“It’s okay,” Nolan tries to argue, his voice a little shaky. “It’s okay, I can—”

He starts to turn, like he was going to slink his way back to his chosen corner. This time it’s Liam who intercepts him, and he does it by shoving an armful of pillow-and-blankets into Nolan’s chest. “You’re _human,_ ” he reminds Nolan with a particularly sharp edge. His eyes flick briefly to Theo’s. “We’re not.”

That’s all the justification or explanation he’s apparently willing to give: he silently dismisses Nolan and turns to throw a bundled-up pile of blankets and a pillow at Theo. Theo feels his upper lip start to curl in a frustrated snarl as he catches them but by the time he’s untangled himself from the linens and dropped his arms back down, Liam is halfway out the door, his own pile of sleeping accessories dropped carelessly on the other side of the room.

“Stay here,” Liam orders, and slams the door shut after himself.

Theo stares after him, his eyes fixed on the rough wood of the room’s door. His jaw works, and then he opens his arms, and lets his own pile of blankets and pillow fall to the floor. _He_ looks at _Nolan_ in turn—Nolan still frozen by the bed—and repeats Liam’s order. “Stay here.”

Liam isn’t hard to find. For one thing the cabin isn’t _big_ by any stretch of the imagination, and for another Theo is an _excellent_ tracker. But it’s neither of those things that give Liam away: it’s the pounding of his heart, the beat of it staccato-quick and furious. He’s out on the back porch with his arms crossed and a mutinous look on his face, and when Theo steps out to join him he doesn’t look in the _least_ surprised.

“What, Theo?” He demands.

Theo feels his own temper start to flare, and he gets his mental hands around it, and _strangles_ it. He makes sure his voice is cool, and calm, and very nearly detached when he says, “I was going to ask you the same thing,” specifically for the way he knows that the contrast will drive Liam _nuts._

And it does. Liam’s eyes flare briefly gold and he snaps a handful of too-sharp teeth as he looks back out at the night-dark woods, his nostrils flaring. Theo feels something _dangerous_ —something that reminds him of standing still that fateful night after Belasko under Scott’s narrow, searching stare; something that reminds him of how it’d felt to maneuver each member of Scott’s pack, the _true alpha’s_ pack, around like chess pieces, capturing them one by one from Scott—go slithering down his spine. 

He keeps pressing on that sore spot. He keeps _digging._ “You know, the attitude’s a little rich considering that _you_ dragged _me_ into this by pulling me out of that cell, not the other way around.”

Liam jerks around to look at him, incredulity all over his face. Whatever poker-face he’d been managing earlier is _gone,_ obliterated; this is just Liam’s raw insides left on display for all—for _Theo_ —to see, and Theo wants more of it. That same dangerous something curls a little tighter.

Except then Liam’s mouth twists up in a sharp little smirk that could _easily_ challenge one of Theo’s own, and he notes, “Seems to _me_ like you dragged _yourself_ into it.”

Theo recoils slightly, his expression blanking with surprise as he deconstructs Liam’s claim, trying to figure out what the hell Liam could mean. And when he does: “Oh, right,” he scoffs. “Because I _wanted_ to be captured and _tortured_.”

Liam’s expression briefly cracks at that, right down the middle. But then it screws up even _harder_. “As far as I’m concerned,” he snarls out, “ _that_ was your own fault, too.”

Theo _pales._ For a moment the shock of it clears his system of that coiled-up ball of anticipation—Liam’s scent and pounding heartbeat sharp and overwhelming in his nose and ears—but then _anger_ pours in to take its place. He takes a step forward towards Liam as he hisses, “Is that right?”

But Liam doesn’t back down. Instead he comes _forward,_ meeting Theo halfway so that they’re _right_ up in each other’s space as he snarls, “You were the one who _left!_ ”

 _Left?_ Theo thinks, confused. _When the hell did I…?_ And then he realizes: “Do you mean after the _Wild Hunt?_ ” He asks, incredulous. Liam’s mouth goes mulish. Theo _laughs_ in complete disbelief, because this is _completely unbelievable._ “Are you _joking?_ What do you think would have happened to me if I _hadn’t?_ ”

Liam doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t look _cowed_ , either. Theo takes another step forward specifically for the way that it’ll drive Liam a step back against the porch’s railing. He keeps him there, half-pinned.

“What do you think, Liam?” Theo insists, and moves from _half_ -pinning him to _fully_ pinning him, his hands on either side of the railing by Liam’s hips. “Because me? I think it would have been exactly what _did_ happen today, when the Sheriff _arrested_ me.” He flicks his eyes back and forth between Liam’s own. He sneers, “ _Forgive me_ for not wanting to hand myself over to be thrown _right back_ into a cage.”

Liam doesn’t back down. In fact he leans _up,_ so that he and Theo are nearly nose-to-nose as he challenges, “You don’t know that that’s what would have happened.”

Theo feels his nostrils flare with frustration. He shoots back. “You don’t know that it wasn’t.”

Liam glares at him for a few seconds longer, and then all at once his hard expression just _splits_ down the middle. Theo gets a half-second glance of something _raw_ underneath, and then Liam is _shoving_ him backwards, and surging out sideways from between Theo’s body and the railing. Liam spends a few of his staccato-pounding-heartbeats facing away from Theo, his shoulders heaving, and then he whips back around.

“You didn’t even _say_ anything to me,” he whisper-shouts. “You just _left._ No warning, no explanation, no _nothing._ You could have,” Liam points out, voice hard but _brittle_ for all that; straining under the weight of the words it's carrying, “been _dead_ for all I knew.”

Theo had been about to force his way back forward, the argument and Liam’s fury hooking _deep_ in his own chest. But at that he pauses, frozen. He stares at Liam, something sharp and prickling and _cold_ suddenly trickling down his spine. Liam’s scent is still hot but now it _sours,_ and it causes Theo’s stomach to roll with the threat of nausea.

“What would you have expected me to do?” He wonders through lips that feel like they’ve gone _numb._ “Come tell you that I was worried the Sheriff was going to _arrest_ me? That Argent might do something more permanent? That _Scott_ might decide to—” 

He cuts himself off, has to, because that sentence ends _reject me,_ and even in his head he can’t bear to finish the thought. 

“What?” He challenges, prickly and defensive and unable to stop himself. “Were _you_ going to stop them? Fight for me? _Help_ me?”

He means it to wound. He _wants_ it to wound. But Liam doesn’t recoil, or stagger back, or do anything else to show that Theo’s barbed, incredulous accusations had landed.

Instead he stays standing exactly where he is, his feet planted _strongly_ into the earth, and he says, very quietly: “Well I guess we’ll never know now, will we, since you didn’t give either of us the chance to find out.”

Theo’s breath catches in his chest. His mouth drops open. Liam watches him for a few more seconds, and then he shakes his head. He looks away, his eyes hooded and heavy-lidded and _disappointed,_ and then he stalks forward. Theo had ended up in front of the door so when Liam heads back inside he has to do it by shoving past Theo, his shoulder knocking Theo’s own.

Theo staggers with it, unable to stop himself. 

It’s cold outside, even for someone like him. Still, it takes Theo a long time to pull himself back together after Liam slams the door back shut behind himself, and force himself back inside.

\---

Theo comes back into the room after a while.

Liam hadn’t, though Nolan had heard him in the house somewhere. He thinks Liam might be in with Corey and Lydia, though with the distance and the muffling walls it’s hard to tell. Not to mention—not to mention that Nolan is really _trying_ not to listen, this sharp-edged voice on a loop in his head reminding him that these aren’t his friends, that he doesn’t belong here. 

That he’s a _political refugee,_ allowed within Scott’s and Liam’s and the rest of their pack’s inner circle because he’s useful to them.

 _That’s not fair,_ he berates himself. He knows that’s not the real reason. He just—doesn’t know what the real reason _is_. He burrows a little more into the sagging mattress below him, but there’s nowhere else really for him to _go:_ he’s already curled into as tight a spiral as seems physically possible. He squeezes his eyes even more tightly shut instead, and tries to pretend like he can’t hear _Theo,_ either, even though Theo is only a few feet away.

“I know you’re awake,” Theo tells him abruptly, and Nolan’s eyes pop open. But Theo’s voice hadn’t been an accusation, or even _sharp._ It’d been—Nolan’s pretty sure Theo had said it to spare Nolan the agonizing internal debate over whether or not he should pretend to be asleep. By saying what he’d said in that weirdly exhausted tone of voice, he’d mooted the issue.

“Sorry,” Nolan mumbles, though he’s not sure what he’s apologizing _for._

Theo doesn’t answer, just—from the scrapes and _shirs_ of it that Nolan can hear—gets his pile of blankets laid out. When he finally collapses down onto them it’s with this quiet sigh that Nolan’s pretty sure Theo hadn’t meant to give, and wouldn’t have wanted anyone to hear. Nolan winces, and keeps staring sightlessly at the dark wall in front of his face.

They lay in silence for a couple of minutes, just the sounds of them quietly breathing and the low murmured rumble of the others talking out in the rest of the house. And then Nolan hears Theo suck in a deep breath, and when he lets it out it’s to ask: “It’s him, isn’t it? The one who you’d ‘had a lot of practice with recently.’” There’s a sound like Theo had turned his head to look over at Nolan, even in the dark. “The one at the station who ‘wanted you back.’”

Nolan freezes. His first, immediate thought is: _I don’t want to talk about this._ He doesn’t owe Theo an explanation. He doesn’t owe _anyone_ an explanation. 

He might want to give somebody one, though.

But after nearly a full, pregnant minute of silence, all he manages to force himself to give is a raspy, “Gabe. His name is Gabe.”

Theo hums in quiet acknowledgement. Nolan waits, _sure_ there’s more, but Theo doesn’t provide it. Instead he just exhales out a rough, low breath after a half-minute or so, and orders, “Get some sleep, Nolan.”

Nolan feels the burn of moisture behind his eyes, something hot and prickly like _disappointment_ twisting itself up in his chest, and he squeezes them shut to keep that moisture from spilling over. 

He keeps them shut.

He opens them the next morning to a hissing argument. He’d rolled over some time in the night so he’s facing the rest of the room rather than the wall, and so when he does he can see Scott and Liam framed in the open doorway. 

“He _can’t_ come with us, Scott,” Liam insists quietly, but forcefully. “They already want to _shoot_ him. This would be giving them a golden opportunity!”

“Well, what _else_ are we supposed to do with him?” Scott counters, and where Liam sounds heated Scott just sounds _tired._ “He can’t come with _us_ to Monroe’s and Gerard’s warehouse, and if we send him anywhere else, he’ll be even more exposed.”

Liam doesn’t respond with words but he does snap his teeth. It’s such an animalistic movement, a canine— _lupine,_ Nolan corrects automatically—display of silent frustration, and it snarls something up in Nolan’s insides to see it. On Liam’s face—pushed through the filter of Liam’s human body—it looks so _natural;_ nothing strange—nothing otherworldly—about it at all.

Suddenly Liam’s brow furrows, and his eyes dart downwards to catch Nolan’s. His expression hardens. 

“Fine,” he tells Scott, and stalks away.

Scott stares after him for a few seconds, and then closes his eyes, very slowly. When he opens them back up again he twists his head sideways just enough that he can look at Nolan. “There’s breakfast waiting,” he offers quietly, and with a lopsided, sympathetic smile. Scott’s kindness is honestly worse than Liam’s hostility and Nolan finds his eyes burning again. He nods to show he’s heard but doesn’t try to speak, because he knows—he _knows_ —his throat would be too tight to get anything out.

There is indeed breakfast waiting when he comes out, instant coffee and oatmeal made with boiling water from the kettle on the stove, slices of toast piled high on a plate. Every slice has one side more charred than the other, which turns out to be unsurprising when Nolan glances at the toaster in question because the thing looks _ancient_. Nolan hovers uncertainly on the edge of the small gathering until Liam finally gets sick of it and shoves an empty mug and plate in his hands, and then he hurriedly pours himself some coffee and grabs a single slice of toast before retreating. 

Theo is sitting in an out-of-the-way corner with his own mug and crumb-laden plate. Nolan hesitates, and Theo’s expression twists with annoyance. He jerks his chin: a clear order. Nolan hurries over to his side.

“Sorry,” Nolan mumbles.

“Eventually you’re either going to have to stop apologizing, or figure out what the hell it is you’re apologizing for,” Theo just responds, and all without looking at Nolan. When Nolan—after jerking and flushing and dropping his eyes to the floor—drags his gaze back up, and follows Theo’s, he’s—watching Liam. 

Liam doesn’t look back.

Not for the remainder of the group’s—the _pack’s,_ Nolan tests out, but goes back to the _group_ because including himself in the former gives him this hot shiver down his spine that he can’t decipher—subdued breakfast, and not when Theo ends up following Liam—Nolan scrambling automatically after Theo—back into their shared room to get ready to go. But once there, Liam suddenly turns around to look critically at _Nolan_. 

He turns around without explanation almost immediately after, and starts digging around the duffel bag he’d brought in from the cars last night. He pulls out a pair of jeans and tosses them to Nolan, who catches them more out of reflex than anything else. “Here.”

“Oh,” Nolan realizes, looking down at himself. His clothes are a wrinkled mess and he’s getting the suspicion that he might not smell that great—fear has a scent, he knows, even if he can’t sense it the same way Liam, or Theo can—but still, he hesitates. “Um.”

Liam just throws him a shirt, too. “Seriously, Nolan. Just shut up and change.”

Nolan shuts up and changes. 

And then standing in the chill of the pre-dawn by Theo’s truck, waiting to climb inside, Nolan shivers. Liam’s borrowed shirt is long-sleeved but just thin cotton and out in the woods it barely traps any heat at all. Nolan tries to tighten every single one of his muscles to stop himself from shivering _again,_ clenching his teeth so that they won’t chatter. But it’s a wasted effort: Theo suddenly leans around him from where he’d been about to climb into the driver’s seat, and pulls something out of the backseat instead. He shoves it against Nolan’s chest.

It’s a jacket. Nolan’s eyes flick up to Theo’s, helpless, and when he does he sees that Theo’s nostrils have flared. But Theo’s not necessarily looking at _Nolan._ His attention is fixed downwards, on—the collar of Liam’s shirt resting against Nolan’s skin. His eyes have a little more pupil to them than Nolan thinks is normal, even with the dull gray of the early morning light.

And then Theo shakes himself. “Get inside,” he orders, and twists back around to climb into his truck without another word.

Liam’s already there, and on the phone. As Nolan is carefully pulling the car door shut behind himself and reaching for his seatbelt, Liam is taking the phone away from his mouth and thumbing the screen; hanging up. 

“It work?” Theo queries.

“Yeah,” Liam mutters, and Nolan doesn’t think he _means_ to—he thinks Liam might in fact be trying to avoid doing so—but Liam shoots a quick, unreadable look back at Nolan in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. He flicks his gaze back to Theo’s almost immediately after. “Mason said he bought it, he’s following Mason now.”

Theo starts his truck.

And takes them to the abandoned _zoo,_ of all places. Nolan has this jarring moment of cognitive dissonance, memories of sticky-hot summers long past overlaid atop the chill and overgrown feel of the place _now,_ and then he blinks and scrambles out of the car to follow Theo and Liam, because neither of them had so much as _paused._ He sticks close to Theo when he realizes that Theo’s following _Liam,_ stopping when Liam does and waiting for Liam to start up again. _He’s never been here before,_ Nolan realizes, chancing a look sideways.

Not like Nolan. 

Not like _Liam,_ clearly, who leads them easily through the twisting maze of concrete passageways until they come to a specific area that Liam must recognize, though Nolan sure as hell doesn’t: it looks exactly like every _other_ abandoned room and exhibit they’d passed. Nolan glances absently around, trying to figure out what Liam and Theo must see in the place, and then he’s yanked out of his thoughts with a panicked jolt when both of them instead start to turn like they’re going to _leave_ again.

“Wait!” Nolan blurts out, taking a step forward.

It’s Liam who orders, “You need to _stay here,_ ” but it’s Theo who catches him by the arm, and walks him a step backwards, so that Nolan is half in the shadows of the overhanging archway, his back nearly to the concrete wall.

“Stay here,” Theo repeats, and his voice is quieter than Liam’s. Low, and _firm,_ but lacking Liam’s sharp edges. “Okay?”

Nolan just looks at him. “What are you two going to do?”

Theo just smirks, but it’s not his smirk from when he’d been tied up in that basement, or even when he’d been goading, goading, goading the Sheriff and Scott and the others. It’s a more wicked thing; almost a little _anticipatory._ He says, “We’re going to go be the diversion.”

Nolan feels his breath catch as he realizes what Theo must mean. He glances over Theo’s shoulder at Liam, and then glances away _fast_ at the hard expression he sees on Liam’s face. He refocuses on Theo. 

And that’s when Theo’s expression abruptly sobers. “Stay here,” he repeats _himself_ this time, and then—when Nolan goes to open his mouth, a little irrationally annoyed, suddenly—Theo raises his voice to talk _over_ him. “I don’t care what, or _who,_ you hear, okay? You _stay here._ ”

Nolan’s brow furrows. He nearly opens his mouth to ask, but Liam suddenly snaps, “Theo, c’mon. We don’t have a lot of time before Mason gets here.”

Theo nods to show he’s heard, and then he takes a step back from Nolan. His hand falls away from Nolan’s arm, but his eyes don’t leave Nolan’s face. Nolan isn’t sure _what_ he’s looking for—he’s just sure that Theo’s looking for _something_ —and then he abruptly understands, or thinks he does. He takes his own final step backwards until his back hits the concrete wall, and then he slides down it, so that he’s sitting.

Theo’s lips flicker like he’s amused, but he also turns around and follows Liam out without another word.

Nolan hesitates for a moment, and then he brings his knees up and braces his feet flat on the ground. He drapes his arms over his knees, and stares at his hands hanging loose between his legs. After a moment he reaches forward, and starts tangling his fingers together.

He stays where Liam, and Theo, had put him.

At one point his head comes up, because he can hear indistinct voices. They’re too far away for him to hear what they’re saying, or who’s speaking, but the rise-and-fall of their speech echoes eerily around the abandoned concrete halls. Nolan stares out into the open air, listening and listening, his heart starting to pound faster; his mouth going dry.

And then his breath _freezes_ in his chest, because he hears someone much, _much_ closer.

Someone he _recognizes._

“Nolan!” That someone hisses. “Nolan, are you here?”

“Gabe,” Nolan breathes, and he’s already scrambled halfway to his feet before he stops. _I don’t care what, or_ who, _you hear,_ Theo had ordered. _You stay here._

_He knew,_ Nolan realizes with a cold jolt. Theo had known Gabe would show up. Liam, too: that quick, unreadable glance Liam had shot him in the car.

Nolan’s jaw tightens. He pushes himself the rest of the way to his feet.

\---

Huddled up against the concrete block that he and Liam had hidden behind, Theo grits his teeth and then lines up his thumb along the side of his broken nose before sliding it, with a disturbingly visceral _crack,_ back into place. He glares at Liam’s back; that third break was just _unnecessary._

“I think they’re sold,” Liam finally announces, his eyes on the wannabe hunters below. As if on cue, Theo hears one of them declare _we gotta call for backup._ He slumps a little harder against the concrete block. Liam glances back at him, and smirks.

 _Feel better?_ Theo wants to demand, but he’s pretty sure the answer’s _yes._ He tips his head back as he listens to the hunters’ radio burr and crackle, his hearing automatically adjusting to try and better hear: were they sending _enough_ back up? He isn’t sure what else he and Liam could do to convince them that the entire pack is here at the zoo if not.

And then he stiffens, because in stretching out his hearing he’d _stretched out his hearing,_ and he catches something else. “Liam,” he breathes, his eyes wide as he twists his head around to stare at him. Liam’s brow furrows, and then clears as he apparently hears what Theo had.

“ _Shit,_ ” he swears. “We told him to—!”

He whips his head back around to look at the hunters below, his teeth gritting. He looks back at Theo.

“They’re friends, right?” He points out. “He wouldn’t—” _hurt Nolan,_ Liam doesn’t say, but Theo doesn’t need him to. His own teeth grit.

He says, “I think that may have been true before all this.”

Liam bites off another curse and darts another look at the hunters. They’re still calling for backup, and peering around what they can see of the abandoned zoo. Theo can nearly see Liam’s mind working, his calculations: he and Theo had needed to pull the hunters away from Monroe’s and Gerard’s warehouse, and they’d _done that,_ apparently. 

Theo knows what Liam’s going to decide even before Liam twists back around at the same time that he surges forward, already on the move as he snags Theo’s wrist and starts dragging him along, too. “Come on.”

They practically _sprint_ through the narrow passageways.

Still, by the time they get back to Nolan, he’s out of the out-of-the-way exhibit Liam had stashed him in, and standing in the middle of _open air_ with _Gabe_ ; Theo recognizes the latter from the station last night. Liam moves like he’s going to rush _right out_ into the fray and so Theo has to catch him, and then drop his whole body weight down to grind Liam’s forward momentum to a halt.

“What the hell are you _doing?_ ” Liam hisses, whipping around to glare at him, but Theo just grits his teeth and jerks his chin towards Gabe.

“Look at what he’s _holding,_ ” Theo orders, directing Liam’s attention to the wicked-looking—and _loaded_ —hunting crossbow that Gabe has in one hand. Liam may not _like_ Nolan, but Theo highly doubts he wants to be the cause of Nolan’s death, even accidentally. Liam sucks in a sharp breath, and stills underneath Theo’s hand. When he glances back this time, it’s a little helpless.

 _Wait,_ Theo just mouths. He flicks his eyes back to Nolan and Gabe.

Nolan and Gabe who are _arguing,_ fierce and loud. “ _Please,_ ” Nolan is pleading. “Gabe just _listen_ to me—” He presses a little closer into Gabe’s space and Theo finds the muscles between his shoulder blades winching tight, can feel Liam going just as stiff, because Nolan is just _way too close_ to the barbed tip of the loaded arrow of Gabe’s crossbow. “We were _wrong._ I think—I think we were wrong!”

“Wrong about _what?_ ” Gabe snaps back. “About how they’re not _human?_ About how many _people_ they’ve gotten killed?”

Nolan shakes his head a little wildly. “They’re trying to help. I don’t think they ever meant—they’re trying to help!”

He’d surged far enough forward on that last claim that he and Gabe are practically chest-to-chest. He’d brought up his hands to clutch at Gabe’s shoulders, like he needed to physically _impress_ his point on Gabe as well. And for a stunned, frozen moment Theo thinks Gabe might even be starting to _listen:_ he pauses, his eyes searching Nolan’s.

He drops the crossbow with a clatter.

Liam _immediately_ moves to rush forward again, clearly sensing their chance. But Theo’s snapped out a hand sideways even before he’s really thought about it, and dragged him back to another stop. “Jesus, Theo!” Liam complains in a furious hiss, yanking his arm free.

“Wait,” Theo just repeats. Quietly. _Firmly,_ because instinct is unspooling itself in his gut and that’s all he can think: _wait, wait, wait._

Gabe wraps his hands around Nolan’s face.

“You’re just confused,” he tells Nolan, his voice ripe with sympathy, with understanding. _Overripe,_ really. He sounds almost a little manic. The instinct that’d been uncurling itself in Theo’s gut starts to prickle its way up his spine. “It’s okay,” Gabe assures Nolan, and strokes one of his hands gently down Nolan’s face before replacing it. “You’re just confused.”

“What?” Nolan breathes, his entire face screwing up: _he’s certainly confused_ now, Theo thinks. Beside him, Liam mouths _what_ in eerie echo.

“You’re just _confused,_ ” Gabe insists, more forcefully this time. His fingers around Nolan’s face are going white-knuckled, and Theo can see Nolan flinch. There’s a battle raging in Theo’s chest: _wait,_ the part of himself that’d managed to weasel its way into the McCall pack and rip them apart whispers; _do something,_ a different part snarls, and that part—

That part sounds like Liam, who’s gone statue-still beside Theo and who barely seems to be _breathing._

And then Theo freezes, and his attention snaps back to Gabe and Nolan from Liam, because Gabe tells Nolan, “It’s that _guy,_ the one who took you from the warehouse. It’s _his_ fault.”

Theo feels his own expression go tight. When Liam glances back at him, equally confused, Theo can’t do anything but stare silently back. 

Nolan just stammers, “W-what? What are you—”

“Monroe told me about him,” Gabe interrupts, his voice staccato-quick now; a little manically excited. Theo realizes he’s holding his breath but can’t make himself _stop._ “Gerard told _her._ He’s not even a werewolf, Nolan,” Gabe says, and this time it’s _Theo_ who flinches _._ “He’s some freak science experiment, made by the same people who made the Beast.”

Liam’s _staring_ back at Theo now. Theo can’t risk looking at him; he has no idea what’s on his face.

“He’s a _spy,_ ” Gabe tells Nolan, and his fingers are digging hard enough into Nolan’s cheeks, and jaw, that Theo can see the little divots they’re making. “A _liar._ He _tricked_ you!”

Gabe says it like a declaration, _triumphant._ Theo can’t see his eyes because Gabe’s back is to him and Liam, and he finds himself oddly _grateful:_ he thinks he can guess how they might be shining. Fervently, ferociously; with all the fierceness of a true believer. _We have to get Nolan away from him,_ Theo thinks, but it’s a small corner of his mind. The rest of him is still rooted to the spot.

_He’s some freak science experiment, made by the same people who made the Beast._

In the middle of the exhibit, Nolan is trying to tug his face free of Gabe’s hold. “No,” he’s arguing. “No, Gabe, that’s _not—_ ”

“It _is,_ ” Gabe insists, overriding Nolan’s denial. He takes a step forward to make up his lost ground, his fingers still _digging_ into Nolan’s face. “It is, but it’s okay. It’s _okay._ ”

He slides one of his hands back into Nolan’s hair, _anchoring_ it there. He probably means it as a comforting gesture but as swept up in his fervor as he clearly is, he doesn’t seem to realize how tight he’s holding: Nolan bites back a small cry, his head tilting backwards on his neck as he clearly tries to relieve the pressure. 

“It’s okay,” Gabe just repeats, heedless or unaware of this. “You can come back. You’ll come back, and everything will be fine. It’ll—it’ll go back to being just like it was.”

Gabe’s voice breaks as he says it, the sound of it full of relief, of _longing,_ but Nolan’s face—what Theo can see of it beyond Gabe’s grasping fingers— _pales_. “No,” he breathes, and then he starts fighting _harder_ to free his head from Gabe’s hands. “No, Gabe. She’ll _kill_ me. She’ll—!”

“She _won’t!_ ” Gabe just denies, and tightens his fingers _harder_ around Nolan’s face, in his hair. This time Nolan can’t bite back his full cry but Gabe seems to ignore it, pushing forward harder into Nolan’s space as he explains, rapid-fire: “She promised me, Nolan. She _promised_ me. She said she understands, that it was that—that _freak’s_ fault, not yours, and that if I could bring you back, there’d be no consequences.” Gabe pauses, like he’s waiting for Nolan to _thank him_ or fall down with gratitude or something, and then he insists, more than a little desperately: “You can _come back,_ Nolan!”

But Nolan just shouts, “I don’t _want_ to come back!” His voice cracks right down the middle when he says it.

“Theo,” Liam suddenly says, right next to his ear. Theo startles and looks reflexively over at him. Liam’s expression is firm, immovable. His jaw is tight. Theo searches it, wide-eyed, for a few seconds, and then he gives a single, sharp nod.

He and Liam both move, Liam splitting off to the right and Theo going to the left.

“Hey!” Theo hears Liam suddenly yell a few seconds later. Theo can’t see him but he can see _Nolan,_ visible through the empty space between two concrete walls and still held fast by Gabe’s hands.

“ _You,_ ” Gabe hisses, and then he releases Nolan at the same time that he starts to spin and crouch down, clearly aiming to scoop up his dropped crossbow.

Theo _moves._

He shoves past Nolan—Nolan gives a startled sound as Theo appears at his side—and ends up behind Gabe _just_ as he goes to raise the crossbow, and point it at Liam stood full-shifted and furious a few feet away. Theo brings one hand arcing forward and _slams_ it against the back of Gabe’s head before he can finish the movement.

Gabe drops like a suddenly-stringless marionette.

Theo stares down at him, his nostrils flaring and his upper lip starting to curl away from his teeth. He can hear Liam’s heavy breathing from a few feet away, gone distended and rough-sounding with his shifted fangs, his half-snarled mouth. 

And then both their heads snap up.

“Shit,” Theo swears, and flicks his eyes back down to Liam.

The surprise had knocked the shift loose from Liam’s face. When he looks back at Theo it’s through wide, human eyes. “We’ve gotta go,” he orders, and starts to hurry across the exhibit—Gabe’s unconscious body ignored—towards the exit.

Theo turns to follow him without a word. Nolan hasn’t moved at all from where Theo shoved him, and in the weak sunlight his face is still pale, color only slowly starting to flow back into the places where Gabe had been holding him. His eyes flick up to Theo’s from Gabe’s crumpled form as Theo turns but he doesn’t move. His breathing is fast and shallow and it _saws_ at Theo’s ears. 

_We don’t have time for this,_ Theo thinks, a weak echo of the same thought he’d had in that gas station bathroom less than twenty-four hours ago, and then he grabs Nolan’s arm, and _drags_ him with them.

\---

There are these thumbprint-sized bruises dotted all over Nolan’s cheeks, and jaw, and Nolan can see Theo and Liam taking turns staring at them in the rearview mirror of Theo’s truck. 

In between staring at them—at _him_ —they glance at each other, and then away. Theo hasn’t said a word and his expression is this carefully-maintained sort of neutral, but Liam is clearly _furious._

“You need to calm down,” Theo mutters to him at one point, quiet enough that he’d probably meant it only for Liam’s werewolf-hearing, but the cab of the truck is so silent that Nolan hears it anyway.

He _also_ hears it when Liam opens up his mouth, and _snarls_ at Theo in response. Full on fang-mouthed _snarls,_ like a dog— _like a_ wolf,Nolan corrects himself insistently—backed into a corner. His eyes above his peeled-back lips are shining gold and Nolan feels his pulse kick up in an _instant,_ instinctive response, but Theo doesn’t so much as twitch.

“ _Liam,_ ” he just hisses, and then—

And then his eyes flick back up to the rearview mirror and the thumbprint bruises dotted all over Nolan’s cheeks, and jaw.

Liam jolts, and blinks rapidly, and when he next twists his head around to look at Nolan—at his _bruises_ —his eyes are no longer shining gold. His mouth is no longer over-full with fangs. 

He slumps back in his seat, and then turns towards his window. 

Nolan feels his face screw up, and _he_ turns towards his own. But doing so just means _he_ can see the bruises on his face, rather than simply feeling the hot throb of them. He closes his eyes, and tips his forehead down against the cool night-dark of the glass, and tries not to feel much of anything at all.

But his eyes pop right back open when Theo suddenly says, “It’s the Anuk-ite. You realize that, right?”

His voice is quiet; level. When Nolan twists his head sideways and up to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror the expression on his face is the same. He stares.

“Gabe,” Theo clarifies, and if Nolan didn’t know better he’d say Theo winces a split-second after Nolan feels _himself_ wince.

“ _No,_ ” Liam interjects, before Nolan can respond. He does it fast and clearly furious, and when Nolan glances reflexively over at him he sees that Liam’s expression has once more twisted up, though he doesn’t seem to have shifted. “That’s _bullshit_. Don’t even _try_ to excuse—”

“I’m not _excusing_ it,” Theo snaps back. “But it is—!”

“I don’t care _what_ new fucked-up monster is running around this town,” Liam snarls, cutting him off and flinging a hand back—a hand back towards _Nolan,_ and his collection of thumbprint bruises. “There’s _never_ an excuse to do _that_ to—”

“What do you mean?” Nolan interrupts. Not loudly. Not _forcefully;_ he doesn’t raise his voice at all. 

Still, both Theo and Liam immediately shut up. They both _immediately_ glance up at him in the rearview, this time simultaneously. Theo’s jaw tightens; Nolan can see a muscle at the corner of it jump. He shoots a searching look at Liam—probably to check if Liam’s going to _let_ him try to explain—and then he swallows.

He meets Nolan’s eyes in the rearview again. “He’d been interested in you for a while before all this, right?”

Nolan shifts uncomfortably, one hand rising to scrub against his opposite forearm. “I mean, I guess, I— We’ve been friends for _forever,_ and—” He cuts himself off, because he knows the answer. “Yes,” he admits, whispering it out.

“He was afraid he was going to lose you,” Theo tells him, and Nolan feels his expression screw up. “That _you_ weren’t interested, or whatever.”

His jaw suddenly tightens. He adds:

“That _someone—_ ” and there’s no doubt what _someone_ he means in this case, Gabe insisting: _It’s that_ guy _, the one who took you from the warehouse. It’s_ his _fault,_ “—was going to take you away from him.”

In the passenger seat Liam bites off a furious sound. Nolan knows what he’s thinking: _there’s_ never _an excuse to do_ that _to—_

“The Anuk-ite feeds on fear,” Theo continues after a quick, warning glance shot at Liam. “It heightens it, feeds it. _Twists_ it.”

He searches Nolan’s eyes in the rearview. He says:

“It’s _not_ that it’s not his fault—” this with another quick, almost _desperate_ glance at Liam, “—but fear—”

“—can drive people to do some, some—” Nolan casts around for the right word, and then he finds it: Liam’s word: “ _—fucked-up_ things.”

 _I’m sorry,_ he thinks, when Liam jerks and glances back at him, his expression more than a little raw. It’s different from the one he’d been wearing when Nolan had been slamming his fist against his face, over and over again; that one had been _defiance_. 

This is—something else.

Liam’s eyes drop away from his own. He turns back forward, but slowly. Nolan feels his own expression crumple up, and he turns towards the window to hide it best he can. But in hiding his face from Liam, from Theo, he ends up accidentally _forcing_ himself to look at it himself, and for the first time since— _since,_ he brings his own fingers up, and touches the swollen-hot spread of bruises over his cheeks, and jaw.

“Is there a way to help him?” He asks, after a few long, silent minutes have dragged themselves by. He twists his head around a little so that he can see Theo and Liam in the front seats again. “If you know what’s causing it, then there _has_ to be a way to—”

“It won’t change what he did,” Liam reminds him, voice level but drum-tight. “What he was _trying_ to—”

“I _know_ that,” Nolan shoots back, and with more than a little _snap_ to his voice. Maybe Theo and Liam and Scott and the others could shake off physical injuries like they were nothing, but Nolan’s the one who’s going to have to spend the next several days walking around with the evidence of what happened for all—for _himself_ —to see. “You think I don’t know that?”

Liam shuts up, his jaw closing with a click. Nolan turns back to the window. He stares at his reflection. He stares at the _bruises._

“But he’s not the only one who’s done something he regrets out of fear,” he says, and quietly. 

In the passenger’s seat, Liam suddenly sucks in a sharp breath. When Nolan jumps and glances reflexively at him Liam looks _stricken,_ but he’s not looking at _Nolan_ —Nolan who’d beaten the shit out of him only a few short days ago—but down at his hands in his lap. He flexes them, and Nolan watches in surprise as his expression screws up _further_ as he does.

In the driver’s seat, Theo looks at Liam, and then looks away from Liam, and his own fingers tighten around the steering wheel so hard that it _creaks._ He doesn’t say anything but it’s a very _loud_ silence. Nolan can’t scent emotions the same way they can but if he _could_ he bets the cab would be _suffocating._

 _What’d you two do that you regret?_ He finds himself wondering, and has to clamp his teeth down around his tongue to keep from _asking._

And then Liam suddenly offers, “Scott thinks if we defeat the Anuk-ite, that’ll—help.”

 _It won’t change what he did,_ he doesn’t repeat, though it hangs in the air there between them. Still: it means something that he doesn’t say it aloud. Nolan—Nolan’s pretty sure that it means something that he doesn’t say it aloud.

Nolan looks back at him. He flicks his eyes to Theo’s, who’s back to watching him in the rearview mirror.

“I want to help, then,” he tells them.

“I want to help you defeat the Anuk-ite.”

\---

Scott takes one look at the mess of Nolan’s face when they get back to the McCall house that night and whirls on Liam and Theo both. “What the hell _happened?_ ” He hisses, his voice half an alpha-rumble. 

Liam’s jaw works in Theo’s peripheral vision. “He ran into an old friend,” Liam mutters back, and leaves it at that.

Still: Liam’s eyes cut sideways to look at Nolan looking huddled and lost in the middle of the McCall living room. Liam’s scent in Theo’s nose hasn’t _stopped_ being hot since Theo put a hand on his arm and dragged him to a halt to prevent him from running out and potentially getting either himself or Nolan—at the _least_ —killed, but it’s been a different kind of heat ever since Nolan muttered: _he’s not the only one who’s done something he regrets out of fear_. 

It’s bitter and sharp and it makes Theo’s mouth keep reflexively filling with saliva. _Fucking stop it,_ he wants to order Liam, except that it’s not really Liam’s fault. 

He puts some distance between them instead. Nolan startles and glances up at him as Theo passes him, and Theo doesn’t even have to order him: when Theo continues to move towards the kitchen, Nolan falls right in behind him. 

In the bright lights of the kitchen, the bruising on his face looks even _worse._ Theo has to look away, because something barbed and squirming twists itself around the base of his spine: _wait,_ he’d ordered Liam, before Gabe had even had a _chance_ to put his hands on Nolan’s face. 

_Wait,_ he’d ordered, because all those old instincts— _he was made by the same people who made the Beast_ —had whispered that it’d be a worthwhile exchange: the horrified look in Nolan’s eyes as he’d stared at Gabe like he’d never seen him before, his hands on Gabe’s to try and free himself. 

Nolan probably doesn’t realize how close he’s standing when he and Theo come to a stop at the island, Mason and Lydia and Ms. McCall and Argent already there. Shifting so that they’re even _closer_ —so that Theo’s shoulder, and arm, are just about brushing Nolan’s chest—feels like the least he can do, so he does it. Nolan probably doesn’t notice but his next breath shudders deeper through his lungs before it shakes right back out of him.

“We found something,” Scott starts to explain as he and Liam and Malia join the impromptu war council around the McCall kitchen island. He unrolls the large paper sheet that’d been sitting there to reveal a map.

Theo sucks in a sharp breath at the same time that Argent does, and when their eyes meet it’s reflex. _The Nemetons,_ Theo thinks, a split-second before Argent echoes, “The Nemetons,” for the benefit of the others, the rest of the gathered group squinting in confusion at Theo and Argent alternatively.

Argent’s eyes never leave his as he explains.

They plan. They debate. They don’t get much of anywhere.

Finally Scott gets fed-up, but not with their lack of progress. “What is _with_ you?” He demands, but his voice is full of reluctant _amusement,_ not irritation, as he looks over at Liam huffing and awkwardly squirming by his side.

Liam freezes, caught, and then slumps, his expression going dry. “I feel _disgusting,_ ” he mutters in explanation, and plucks at his blood- and mud-stained shirt.

He glares over at Theo, who smirks back. That _his_ shirt is covered in the same barely registers in the face of Liam’s delightfully petty irritation.

Scott laughs a little, can’t seem to help it. He looks critically at Liam, and then at Theo. “Run home,” he orders, after he has. “Shower. _Change._ Maybe,” he adds, raising his eyebrows pointedly, “take a power nap.”

Scott saying that means he’s scented the same thing Theo has: they’re all goddamned exhausted. Chances are Scott will be forcing the others gathered around the island to do the same here soon. Liam glances over at Theo. His head tilts in a silent question.

Theo pushes off the counter. “My truck is almost out of gas,” he reminds Liam, a little jarred by how _banal_ that specific problem is in the face of the others they’re facing.

“We’ll take my car,” Liam dismisses, and starts heading that way.

But he only gets partway there—Theo and Nolan stopping too, because when Liam had moved _Theo_ had moved, and Nolan had followed a split-second behind—when Scott suddenly twists around to catch Liam’s arm, and guide him to a gentle stop. Liam frowns, and glances curiously up at him.

“There’s something else,” Scott tells him, quiet, but Theo doesn’t see whatever look accompanies his sudden sorrowful tone of voice; he’s too busy whipping his head up and around to stare at _Malia,_ who snaps sharp teeth and glares sightlessly at a bare stretch of wall, her nostrils flaring. 

Still, he hears it when Scott murmurs, “It’s about Jiang and Tierney.” 

Theo looks away from Malia, and Liam, and Scott. He doesn’t look at anybody as Scott finishes telling Liam what it is, exactly, about Jiang and Tierney.

Liam drives them back to his house, Theo’s truck left parked on the street in front of the McCall house. He’s preoccupied and furious but he seems to remember Theo’s hissed order from earlier in the night— _you need to calm down_ —because every now and then his eyes flick up to Nolan in the rearview, and he sucks in these huge, deep breaths, and exhales them out slow. His quick-stepping tempo of his pulse drops every time he does, and stays dropped until he forgets himself again, and the cycle repeats.

Theo doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t stop him from having to breathe in the swirling, cloying mix of Liam’s hot scent in the front, and Nolan’s ashy one in the back, but it at least prevents him from opening his mouth and making anything _worse_.

 _Wait,_ he’d said, because Gabe had been right, and he’d been made by the same people who’d made the Beast.

When they get to Liam’s, he takes them straight up to his room. His parents aren’t home—“date night,” Liam mutters in explanation, apparently interpreting Theo’s silence as _curious_ —and he shoves a handful of clothes and a towel into Nolan’s arms first. “Through there,” he orders, pointing towards his room’s attached bathroom door. 

Nolan goes after only a few seconds of hesitation.

Liam sits down on his bed, and covers his face with his hands.

He makes Theo go next, when Nolan comes out freshly showered and changed and swimming a little in the shirt Liam had provided; he may be _taller_ than Liam, but Liam’s shoulders are broader. Theo has to stop his nostrils from flaring; has to take in short, shallow breaths to avoid taking in deep, _dragging_ ones. 

Heading into the bathroom is as much a retreat as it is anything else.

But when he comes back out—feeling, admittedly, at least twenty-percent more...not _human,_ but whatever he is; _he’s some freak science experiment_ —there’s no avoiding it anymore. Liam passes him on his way into his own bathroom to take his own shower, and Theo’s left with Nolan swimming a little in Liam’s shirt, Nolan huddled on the edge of Liam’s bed with his eyes heavy-lidded and his head lolling, just a little.

Theo’s surprised _not at all_ when he finally tips sideways, and back, and winds up curled up on the end of Liam’s bed in exhausted sleep.

He’s leaning back against a bare stretch of Liam’s wall, just watching, when Liam comes back out. He has a towel in his hands and he’s scrubbing it roughly over his hair, and he looks at Theo and then follows his gaze. “Little creepy,” he informs him. Theo just shrugs, and doesn’t respond, waiting because—

Because Liam starts to do the same, his eyes fixing on the starkest of the bruises on Nolan’s jaw, half-hidden by the hinge of it and his ear. _Liam’s_ jaw clenches.

“He should be angry,” he says, the words coming out burred like Liam had managed to keep the shift out of his eyes and mouth but not out of his vocal cords.

Theo doesn’t reply right away, his gaze drifting from Nolan’s marked-up face to his chest, where Theo can hear his heart beating rabbit-fast, even in sleep. “He will be,” Theo assures Liam, because one day Nolan _will be._ “But right now, he’s just—scared.”

Of a lot of things, Theo bets, and not all of them obvious. Scared of Monroe and her wannabe hunters, definitely. Scared of Gabe, probably. But more than that: scared that everything that’d happened had become irrevocable, somehow; set in stone. The hair on the back of Theo’s neck keeps trying to prickle in sympathetic response to whatever it is Nolan’s scared of regardless, Nolan’s scent thick in the back of his throat.

Liam, though: Liam just scowls. “He should try being both at the same time.”

Theo just shakes his head. “People only feel one emotion at a time.”

He glances at Liam. He says:

“It’s why _you_ get angry when you’re afraid.”

The tight look on Liam’s face slackens some in surprise as he jerks and looks up at Theo from where his gaze had still been fixed on Nolan. Theo holds his eyes.

But.

“Yeah?” Liam suddenly wonders, and there’s a sudden soft edge to his voice; a _dangerous_ one. His eyes narrow and his chin tips up. “And what do _you_ get?”

Theo just stares at him, caught. Liam looks right back, just as steadily as Theo had been looking at _him,_ and then he scoffs a little. He shakes his head, and looks away, and throws his towel over his shoulder as he goes to wake up Nolan, because—Theo thinking it as he realizes what Liam’s doing—they really do need to get back to the McCall house.

But partway there, Liam startles, because his phone starts to vibrate wildly in his pocket. He pulls it out and his brow furrows, and Theo gets why: _Scott McCall,_ the screen reads. Liam answers.

He _pales._

The hospital’s a chaotic mess when they get there but it’s the type of chaotic that comes from a busy night, not supernatural calamity. The nurses at the station by the emergency room entrance recognize Liam as he rushes in—followed instantly by Theo and Nolan—and they direct him up to the right floor, no questions asked.

Scott is there, his hands covered in blood that isn’t his own.

Theo slows to a stop but Liam just keeps surging forward, until he can all but _crash_ into Scott huddled in a waiting room chair, Malia next to him with one of her hands anchored _tight_ around the back of Scott’s neck. “What _happened?_ ” Liam demands, going immediately to his knees between Scott’s so that he can peer up at Scott, his eyes soft and sympathetic and desperate.

“I don’t know,” Scott mumbles. “I don’t, we were just _there_ in the kitchen, and then Lydia yelled at everyone to get down, and—”

And then someone had opened fire on the house. If Theo concentrates he can pick out each and every one of the injured, from Mrs. McCall under Liam’s dad’s knife to Argent to Lydia to Mason. A few floors down he can even sense _Agent_ McCall, paramedics all around him negotiating for an airlift to a bigger, more resourced hospital.

“ _Who?”_ Liam insists. “Scott, _who—_ ”

Scott shakes his head. “We don’t know,” he just repeats. “We don’t—”

But beside Theo, Nolan has gone _board_ -stiff. Intuition twists up and around Theo’s spine like a strangling vine climbing a trellis, and he finds himself twisting around to stare at Nolan, who jerks and stares wide-eyed back. 

“I think I do,” Theo realizes. 

\---

Nolan wakes up the next morning because something crashes down the hallway.

He’s curled into one of the uncomfortable chairs in the waiting room of Beacon Hills Memorial’s third floor, his head—at least _previously_ —resting against the wall beside him and his legs pulled up into his chest. He lifts his head and peers blearily around, but the crash had been innocuous: an overloaded nursing assistant had dropped something, and sworn. Nolan starts to let his head relax back, his eyes already fluttering closed, when a realization finally penetrates his sleep-fogged brain, and they snap right back open.

He looks around wildly for a second, and then _scrambles_ out of his chair.

“Theo,” he says hurriedly, both hands on one of Theo’s arms and shaking him. “Theo, wake up!”

Theo frowns, his eyes still closed where he’d fallen asleep in another waiting room chair with his arms crossed and his legs stretched out, and then he blinks them slowly open. He squints at Nolan.

“He’s gone,” Nolan tells him, and Nolan can _see_ the thought failing to compute for the split-second before it _does_. 

Theo’s eyes blow wide and he jerks upright, his gaze dragging around the room as he clearly searches it. In the next second they bleed gold and it takes Nolan a second to realize _why:_ Theo shifting his hearing and his sense of smell, stretching them out so that he could search the rest of the hospital, but still half-asleep or just plain too _panicked_ enough to exercise his usual control over the individual parts of the shift. Nolan feels his breath catch but it’s not _fear:_ he has to stop himself from reaching out trembling fingers to touch the skin just below Theo’s bright-flaring right eye.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Theo swears, apparently confirming what Nolan had already known, and he surges to his feet. He grabs Nolan’s arm as he goes, one smooth unbroken movement, but it wouldn’t have mattered: Nolan had immediately lurched upwards onto his own feet to follow, no encouragement necessary.

They make it down to the parking lot in less than a minute. “We don’t have a _car,_ ” Nolan attempts to point out even as he’s hurrying after Theo. 

“Sure we do,” Theo denies absently, his gaze roving over the three-quarters full lot. He barely _slows_ as he apparently picks a target.

It’s an older model. Theo half-jogs over to the driver’s side door, but then he stops. At first Nolan wonders if he’s experiencing second thoughts over the fact that he’s _clearly_ about to steal a car, but then an ambulance roars into the emergency bay with lights and sirens blaring, and Theo suddenly jams an elbow against the driver’s door window. It shatters but the crash of it barely registers over the siren, and Theo has wormed his arm inside the car and unlocked the door within seconds. Nolan stares.

“Get in,” Theo just snaps, the driver’s door already opened and the rest of the doors unlocked. Nolan scrambles to obey even as Theo is carelessly brushing aside the broken glass from the driver’s seat, his hands already working underneath the dash.

It takes him less than half a minute to hot-wire it, and they’re speeding away from the hospital in less than a half minute after _that._

Nolan doesn’t even bother trying not to openly stare at him as they go. “What do you think he’s going to do?” Nolan whispers, and Theo shoots him a quick, pinched-mouth look.

“Something he regrets,” Theo answers after a few seconds, and puts his foot down harder on the stolen car’s gas pedal. 

Classes have already started by the time they reach the school, which thankfully means that the hallways are all but empty. Nolan runs after Theo as he leads them onwards, no pauses or hesitation which Nolan realizes means he’s _definitely_ using his shifted sense of smell to _track._ Something hot squirms in Nolan’s gut, his gaze glued between Theo’s shoulder blades; something buried underneath the abject _panic_ eating at his gut, but something that feels a lot like _fascination_ nonetheless.

Theo suddenly grinds to a halt just outside the high school’s locker room, and pivots around to catch Nolan as Nolan all but barrels right into him. Nolan staggers, his eyes going wide and his biceps throbbing a little where Theo is gripping him _tight._

“You have to _stay here,_ ” Theo orders him, his eyes _locked_ on Nolan’s own. “And I swear to god, Nolan, if you don’t actually _stay_ this time—”

“I will,” Nolan interrupts, guilt twisting his throat tight like a _valve._ “I will, I swear.”

Theo searches his face for a second longer, and then he gives a single, short nod. He drops his hands away from Nolan’s arms. He closes his eyes, and sucks in deep, bracing breath, and when he opens them again his expression has smoothed out. There’s no trace of the panic that Nolan had seen when he’d woken Theo up with two hands on his arm or the grim-mouthed determination on Theo’s face when he’d been driving them here.

He steps past Nolan, and enters the locker room. Nolan lasts exactly three seconds, and then he twists around so that he can see through the crack left by the not-quite-closed door. 

He sees the cracked mirror, and the blood, and Liam’s hand pressed _hard_ against the back of Gabe’s head. 

“Did you know who was there?” Liam is demanding. “Did you know _Mason_ was in there?”

“No, I didn’t know anything,” Gabe tries to deny, and over the abnormally _loud_ -sounding crackling of the spidering cracks in the mirror, Nolan can’t tell if he means it; if he’s lying. 

Liam probably can, though. He _snarls._ Gabe bites back a cry as Liam jams his face harder against the cracked mirror.

“Maybe you haven’t noticed lately,” Liam informs him, voice a _deadly_ sort of level, “but I’ve been having trouble controlling my anger. When something happens to my _friends,_ ” he drives his hand even harder forward; Nolan can see several additional drops of blood splash down into the sink from the side of Gabe’s cut-up face, “I just can’t seem to help it.”

“No, Liam, wait,” Gabe pleads. “ _Please._ ”

 _Theo, where are you?_ Nolan wonders, but with the angle of the door Nolan can’t see him, wherever he might be.

“Did you _know?_ ” Liam repeats, and this time he drives Gabe’s face hard enough against the mirror that a single shard breaks loose, and falls to _shatter_ on the floor at their feet. 

Liam freezes. It’s hard to tell but Nolan’s pretty sure he sees Liam’s fingers _spasm_ against the back of Gabe’s head.

He breathes, “Theo’s truck was parked outside. You thought Nolan was there.” He suddenly snarls, and drives back _harder_ forward. “You thought Nolan was there!”

Gabe cries out and Nolan takes a helpless half-step forward, even as something is _twisting_ hard in his chest— _you thought Nolan was there_ —and then:

“You’re really going to kill him?” Theo suddenly wonders, idle and academic and _curious._

Nolan _freezes._

So does Liam, his head twisting back around on his neck to stare behind himself. His hand never moves from the back of Gabe’s head but it apparently relaxes enough that another several drops of blood can fall from Gabe’s cut-up cheek to the sink. Nolan doesn’t know what the hell to do. 

He sucks in a sharp, shaky breath when Theo adds, “I mean, I don’t care if you do.”

 _He’s a spy,_ Gabe had said at the zoo yesterday. _A liar._ Nolan does his best to rip apart Theo’s tone but he genuinely can’t tell if it’s an act or if Theo means it.

Nolan can’t tell whether _he_ cares if Theo does.

Theo keeps talking. Probing practical questions. _Logistics._ “But have you thought this through? Any idea where you’re going to dump the body? No one saw you _grab him,_ did they? ‘Cause that could be a problem.”

Liam’s fingers spasm again against the back of Gabe’s head. His expression is _brutal;_ mutinous. He glares back at Theo. “I don’t care.”

“I don’t care, either,” Theo shoots back, and from the easy unconcerned lilt of his voice, he really doesn’t. “But at least let me help. I’m the one with experience, here.”

 _He’s a spy, a liar,_ Gabe had said. _Made by the same people who made the Beast._ Nolan’s breaths are starting to come short and fast enough that he absently wonders if he’s going to hyperventilate. If Liam genuinely wants to kill Gabe then Theo will help him, Nolan realizes, and there’s nothing Nolan can do to stop them.

He isn’t sure he _wants_ to do anything to stop them.

“If we kill him,” Theo is still musing, “we’ll have to find the witnesses and kill them, too.” Nolan’s short, shallow breaths become just _short;_ he stops breathing. “Which means we’re going to need shovels, some plastic bags, maybe a chainsaw…”

There’s a long, dragging moment of silence followed by a sudden meaty _thud_ as Liam takes an unexpected step back, and Gabe collapses to the floor. Nolan follows his progress and then his eyes snap _right_ back up to the cracked mirror, the surface of it coated in a thin film of blood. He can see Liam staring at it, same as Nolan himself is, and then he stiffens, because Liam’s attention suddenly cuts sideways. There’s no way he can _see_ Nolan with the angle of the door, but he can clearly _sense_ him. 

His nostrils flare. He keeps right on staring at the door as he says, “You’ve made your point.”

“And you didn’t kill him,” Theo offers back. “That’s progress.”

Liam whirls around so that he’s facing the other way—Gabe still ignored, groaning, at his feet—and his eyes flare as he demands, “What do you think you’re doing, Theo?” Nolan can’t _see_ Theo but he can imagine the way that his jaw probably clenches, Theo’s expression going that carefully locked-down sort of neutral. “Why do you keep trying to save me?”

 _Oh,_ Nolan thinks, blinking. _He doesn’t know._

He _must_ not, because he claims, “You think it’ll make Scott forget about everything you did?” Nolan’s brow furrows. What _had_ Theo done? “That he’ll just let you into the pack?”

His expression twists, goes a little _mean._

“Scott’s _never_ going to trust you,” he spits out.

“You,” Theo shoots back, and even without seeing his face Nolan can hear the cool tone to his words, “might want to remember what Scott’s goal has been all along—keeping people _alive._ ”

They’d forgotten about Gabe. _Nolan_ had forgotten about Gabe. But they’re all forced to remember him when he suddenly gives a mean-spirited laugh, and sneers, “He should try harder.”

 _You thought Nolan was there,_ Nolan hears again as he stares down at Gabe through the crack in the door, but it’s a distant thought. It’s subsumed underneath Theo suddenly stepping forward, closer to Liam— _shoulder-to-shoulder_ with Liam—and demanding, voice low and dangerous: “What are you talking about?”

Gabe just smirks, and tips his chin up in obvious challenge. _Don’t,_ Nolan finds himself silently warning. _Don’t push him._ But Gabe _does:_ “You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know _what?_ ” Liam snarls, but Gabe just _laughs._

He stops, though, when Theo darts a quick glance at the furious look on Liam’s face, and then suddenly _surges_ forward to grab Gabe by his collar, and _haul_ him back up. He pins him right back to the cracked, bloody mirror by the back of his head, an exact reproduction of how Liam had just a few short minutes before. The cracks in the mirror spider outwards even further. 

Gabe bites back a cry. 

He bites out, “About the other bodies!”

Theo’s eyes narrow on the back of Gabe’s head. He twists around to look at Liam, who shakes his head silently back. Theo’s lips peel back from his teeth, and he jams Gabe’s head a little harder against the mirror.

He demands, “ _What_ other bodies?”

\---

Gabe keeps trying to twist around to look at Nolan mostly hidden behind the bulk of Liam’s body, and Liam’s lips eventually peel back from his teeth in a subvocal snarl when he notices.

Positioned in between them in their little train, Theo grits his teeth. He reaches up and clenches a hand in the fabric of Gabe’s shirt, right between his shoulder blades, and yanks him close so that Theo can hiss, “I am _not_ getting in between you two a second time,” right in Gabe’s ear. 

He shoves him stumbling back forward.

“Eyes in front of you,” he orders.

 _He_ glances back over his shoulder, and meets Liam’s eyes. Liam’s jaw tightens. Over his shoulder, Nolan’s clearly trying to maintain as neutral an expression as possible, except that he’s _awful_ at it: Theo can tell, from the distended shape of the skin right below Nolan’s mouth, that Nolan has pulled the inside of his bottom line between his teeth, and is biting down on it. _He’s going to bite through it,_ Theo finds himself predicting as his eyes flick briefly up to Nolan’s. They have to drag past the bruises still starkly dotting Nolan’s face to do it and he can feel his claws itching at his fingertips hanging down by his sides.

He turns his attention back forward, to the unprotected stretch of Gabe’s back.

Gabe leads them through the hallways, classes still going on obliviously around them and every now and then a random student passing them. Every time one of them does their eyes dart from Nolan, to _Gabe,_ and only briefly to Liam and Theo, and then they scurry faster away. Theo stares after the latest, his brow furrowing as he squints at the bloodstained white bandage wrapped inexpertly around their hand. He glances back at Nolan, who shakes his head: he doesn’t know, either.

Finally Gabe stops. They’re in front of a locked door that Theo recognizes as leading into the science faculty’s storage room. 

He wraps one hand tightly around the back of Gabe’s neck, and leans forward to put his other hand on the door handle. He _presses_ down until the lock mechanism gives, and then shoves the door open at the same time that he shoves Gabe inside. Gabe staggers and nearly falls, except that Theo had unintentionally thrown him against a table; Gabe catches himself on the edge, and then twists around to glare at Theo.

Theo just lets his upper-lip curl back from teeth gone sharp. Gabe _pales,_ and looks quickly away.

He scrambles—moving a little awkwardly hunched-over, one hand pressed to his side where he’d impacted the table—to a large standalone freezer in a corner of the room. Theo follows after, Liam and Nolan following after _him,_ and then waits expectantly once he reaches it. 

At his back, Liam is very warm: running hot from the shift still slouching just under the surface of his skin.

Gabe darts a glance between all three of them—his eyes lingering for just a _moment_ on Nolan before he forces them away—and then he reaches down, and lifts up the freezer’s lid.

Theo _gags._

Behind him he can hear Liam doing the same, but he’s too busy covering his mouth with the back of one wrist and trying to shove down the insistent urge to be _sick_ to really do anything about it. When Gabe had first opened the freezer and Theo had gotten his first mouthful of the scent, Theo had stumbled backwards; fingers land on his hip— _Nolan’s_ fingers—to steady him. 

When Theo twists around to look, Nolan has his other hand clenched in the fabric covering the broad stretch of Liam’s back, Liam folded-over with his hands on his knees as he silently dry-heaves.

Nolan meets Theo’s eyes, his own panic-wide.

Theo realizes then that Nolan’s fingers on his hip, and clenched in Liam’s shirt, are trembling. Chances are Nolan’s holding onto them as much to keep _himself_ upright as to keep them that way. _You’ve never seen a dead body before,_ Theo realizes, and his head is turning around—his upper lip is curling _up_ —to glare at Gabe before he’s even fully thought about it.

“Look, we didn’t kill them,” Gabe insists, recoiling back. “We tested them to see if they were werewolves, but we didn’t _kill_ them.” He’s still standing with one hand on the lid, the three bodies shoved into the freezer staring sightlessly—truly _sightlessly,_ since their eyes are gone and replaced with disturbingly black pits—upwards. He sounds a little shaky—he hadn’t expected the force of their reactions, maybe.

“Of course you didn’t,” Theo snarls, the words coming out wet and jagged through the mouthful of reflexive saliva that he can’t eliminate no matter _how_ many times he swallows; every new breath he tries to suck in afterwards just fills it right back up as he smells the miasmic _stink_ of abject _fear_ still clinging to the bodies. 

With the stink of _Nolan’s_ fear, buried underneath that of the bodies and his own shock, but still there.

“It’s the Anuk-ite,” Liam manages to grind out in-between retches. He’s saying it to Theo, a confirmation of what they both know, but Gabe interprets it as being directed towards _him_.

“The _what?_ ” He demands.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Theo counters, ignoring Gabe and arguing with Liam’s point even though he _knows_ Liam’s right. “Why would the Anuk-ite want to kill anyone? It feeds off fear.”

“Dead people aren’t afraid,” Nolan realizes, apparently catching on. His gaze darts up to meet Theo’s when Theo glances automatically at him.

Liam’s managed to straighten, finally. He smells _awful,_ now, _sickly,_ even though he hadn’t actually vomited up more than saliva and a mouthful or two of bile. He takes a step forward—the back of one wrist pressed to his mouth, just like Theo—to stare down at the bodies. “Maybe the killing is just a by-product,” he proposes, his voice thick, and twists his head around to look at Theo as he does.

Theo feels the first stirrings of instinct in his gut. “Of what?”

“Of it looking for its other half,” Liam explains, looking back down at the bodies’ gaping, sightless eyes; at their mouths stained with black blood. _Two-Face,_ Deaton had told Mason and Corey. 

That’d been the Anuk-ite’s other name: Two-Face. Theo looks down at the bodies. Gabe had said something about _testing_ them. Testing them to see if they were werewolves.

“Which means it’s looking for a supernatural creature. Someone like us,” Theo realizes.

“So these three could have been werewolves,” Liam concludes quietly; thoughtfully. “Just not the ones that the Anuk-ite was looking for.”

Theo looks where Liam is looking, down at the frost-limned bodies. He can feel his mind working, and working. Nolan’s fingers are still warm on his hip. He’d never taken them away. His hand _had_ fallen away from Liam’s back, but consciously or not Liam had stepped close enough to him when he’d moved forward towards the freezer that he and Nolan are practically touching anyway. 

“You said ‘we,’” Theo remembers abruptly, and jerks his attention upwards to stare narrow-eyed at Gabe; Gabe stiffens and his pulse rockets up in Theo’s ears. “You said _‘we_ didn’t kill them.’” He searches Gabe’s face, his nostrils flaring. “Who’s ‘we?’”

Gabe’s jaw clenches. For a vicious moment Theo _wants_ him to refuse to answer, _desperately._ His fingers twitch at his sides, his claws prickling just underneath the surface. 

Gabe’s eyes drop to them. He swallows. “Aaron,” he blurts out. “It was Aaron. It was his idea to test everyone.”

“Who’s Aaron?” Theo demands, but he demands it of Liam, stood by his side, and Nolan, stood just behind him with his fingers still on Theo’s hip. 

“He’s on the lacrosse team,” Nolan answers quietly, just as Liam murmurs, his voice _ripe_ with confusion: “He’s just a freshman.”

His head snaps up so that he’s staring at Theo. Even before he says what he says, Theo _knows_ what it’s going to be.

“He’s the Anuk-ite,” Liam realizes. “Aaron is the Anuk-ite.”

\---

Liam and Theo are casually standing over three dead bodies shoved in a freezer, and neither of them seem particularly thrown by the experience.

“We can’t leave them here,” Liam decides, his gaze roving over the gaping sockets where the bodies’ eyes should be, their black-stained mouths. He has one arm folded over his chest and the other elbow resting on it, the fingers of the attached hand rubbing at his bottom lip as he glances up at Theo, clearly checking his logic. “We need to show Scott and the others.”

Nolan watches as Theo tips his head down to look at the bodies, too. His gaze is just as assessing as Liam’s; just as clinical. “Deaton’s?” He proposes.

Liam nods. “I’ll go get my car.”

He pivots, and starts heading away. Instead of heading towards the door they’d entered through, though—the one that’d lead back into the school—he heads for the opposite one. It leads outside into the faculty parking lot and it’ll let Liam access his car without drawing too much unwanted attention. _Smart,_ Nolan thinks, but absently, because his eyes are still fixed downwards on the bodies in the freezer. He hasn’t really looked away since Gabe first lifted the freezer’s lid.

 _That’s Mr. Jeremy,_ he just keeps thinking; Mr. Jeremy who’d sat with Nolan for an _hour_ after school ended just a few short weeks ago, trying to walk him through the latest unit because he’d caught the helpless, frustrated look on Nolan’s face when handing back their last assignment. Someone—Gabe, maybe, or whoever had helped him—had had to contort Mr. Jeremy’s body awkwardly to fit around the sprawl of Jason Mickenberg’s limbs, since apparently Jason is just as incapable of controlling them in death as in life. 

_I think I’m going to be sick,_ Nolan thinks. It doesn’t matter that he can’t smell whatever Theo and Liam obviously did when they’d all but doubled over after Gabe opened the freezer. Mr. Jeremy and Jason Mickenberg and Elena Gomez would be unrecognizable with their gaping empty eye sockets and fear-stricken expressions, except that Nolan’s known them nearly all his _life._ He feels bile rise in his throat.

And then he feels a hand on his arm. He jumps, and looks up, expecting it to be Theo.

It’s not Theo.

“Hey,” Gabe tries, soft and soothing and like he _hadn’t_ helped cover up the killings of three innocent people that they’d both known. Like he _hadn’t_ left a series of bruises dotted all over Nolan’s cheeks, and jaw. He steps a little closer. “Hey, it’s o—”

That’s as far as he gets. A hand suddenly appears in the middle of his shirt and yanks him backwards, away from Nolan—Gabe’s eyes going wide—a split-second before a foot jams itself right above his right knee, buckling his leg and sending him to his knees. The hand that’d been on Gabe’s shirt snaps up to catch his face as he falls, the grip tight enough that all of the blood rushes out of the skin underneath the five grasping points of the attached fingers. 

It’s not an exact match for how Gabe had gripped _Nolan’s_ face, but it’s close. Nolan startles, and jerks his attention upwards to Theo.

But Theo’s not looking at him. He’s staring down at Gabe, his fingers tightening on Gabe’s face—Gabe gives a muffled yelp, the sound of it distorted by Theo’s grip pressing his mouth into a crushed shape—but the thing is, there’s no _heat_ to his gaze. When Liam had been driving Gabe’s face into that mirror he’d been _emanating_ so much fury that even Nolan could sense it. But Theo’s expression is perfectly level. Perfectly _calm._

 _Cold,_ even. His wrist starts to twist. Nolan thinks, very clearly, _he’s considering breaking his neck,_ and isn’t sure where the certainty in himself comes from but come it does. 

He blurts out, “Wait. Wait!”

Theo twists his head around slightly to look at him. Gabe’s eyes flick to his, too, terror-wide and nearly all pupil.

“Don’t,” Nolan finds himself pleading. He’s doing it through lips that feel like they’ve gone numb and he’s forcing the words out through a bruised jaw that feels like it doesn’t want to say them. Still: “Please—please don’t.”

Theo doesn’t answer right away. He doesn’t argue, or take his hand away from Gabe’s face; he just _watches,_ his eyes searching Nolan’s. Movement out of the corner of Nolan’s eye catches his attention and he immediately looks down to see one of Theo’s fingers tapping thoughtfully against Gabe’s cheek, Gabe breathing fast and shallow below Theo’s grip; Nolan can see the fitful rise-and-fall of his chest.

And then Nolan is jumping, because just as abruptly as he’d put Gabe on his knees, Theo is pivoting sideways to slam Gabe’s head against the freezer. Gabe goes out like a light, and Theo lets him crumple carelessly to the floor.

Nolan releases the breath he hadn’t fully realized he’d been holding. He forces his gaze up to Theo’s to find Theo watching him silently back.

And then they both look sideways, because Liam reappears in the doorway he’d originally disappeared through. He dangles his keys pointedly from his fingers as he orders, “C’mon.”

It doesn’t take Liam and Theo long to load up the bodies, each one wrapped up in a pile of rough woolen blankets that Liam brings in from his car for transport out of the freezer. Liam barely pays attention to Gabe’s unconscious body; he looks thoughtfully up from it to Theo exactly once, who meets his eyes levelly back, and that’s it, apparently. “We should hurry,” Liam simply says.

Back in his car, Liam drives, unsurprisingly. Theo stretches out in the passenger’s seat, seemingly content to be chauffeured around. His eyes go heavy-lidded; Nolan can see them in the rearview mirror from his place in the backseat. Nolan studies them for a few seconds, and then his own eyes flick sideways because—

Because he realizes Liam is watching _him_ in the rearview. His breath freezes in his chest.

But Liam just suddenly wonders, “How’d you get here, anyway?”

Theo rouses a little, turning his head from the window towards Liam instead. He shrugs loosely and bites off a yawn; Nolan doesn’t know why the casual gesture catches him so off-guard, but it does. “Nolan realized you were missing from the hospital,” Theo tells Liam. “He woke me up.”

Nolan chances another look at Liam in the rearview. Liam’s already looking back, he finds; Liam’s eyes are narrow, and thoughtful, and he searches Nolan’s face as Nolan stares back, caught.

But finally Liam lets his gaze fall away. He lets it fall away _back to Theo._

“No, I mean,” he presses, “how did you _get_ here?”

Nolan’s not sure what point Liam is driving at but apparently Theo does. He snorts a dry laugh. “Yeah, you didn’t exactly leave us a mode of transportation.” 

He gives Liam a pointed, wry look. Liam looks anything but embarrassed. If anything he looks a little _defiant._

“He stole a car,” Nolan offers, because suddenly it seems important that Liam _know that._ Liam and Theo both startle—broken out of their staring contest with each other, maybe—and both glance up at him in the rearview. Nolan forces a grin—shaky, but there—onto his lips.

Theo doesn’t say anything, but Liam laughs quietly. It’s breathy and low but it’s not in the least malicious; the look he shoots Theo is speculative, considering. 

_His_ lips keep flickering up into these split-second, seemingly helpless smiles.

After another second or two Theo rolls his eyes, and slumps further into his seat. “I’ll report myself to the Sheriff, how’s that?” He snarks. Liam grins _wider._

He glances up into the rearview mirror after, and Nolan can’t help grinning right back.

There’s only one person at the building—the _animal clinic;_ Nolan can see the sign over the door—that Liam takes them to. He stands waiting with his arms crossed as Theo and Liam hop down—Nolan following after a moment of hesitation—and his expression is as dry as some of Theo’s best when he murmurs, “One of these days I hope you’ll pull up with something _other_ than a massively disturbing revelation,” to Liam.

“You and me both,” Liam mutters back, and then he goes to help Theo unload the bodies.

It leaves Nolan standing with the man—with Deaton?—in the parking lot. He searches Nolan’s face for a few seconds, and then he turns. “This way,” he says.

Nolan doesn’t move for a moment, and then he follows.

Liam and Theo have already laid out Mr. Jeremy and Jason Mickenberg on two stainless steel metal tables by the time Deaton leads Nolan back into the examination room. There’s a third wrapped body—Elena Gomez—still draped carefully over Theo’s right shoulder and Deaton eyes it critically for a moment before nodding towards another door. “The freezer for now, please.”

Nolan has to swallow down another mouthful of bile while Theo moves to obey.

He also ends up huddled in a waiting room chair while Deaton and Theo and Liam examine the bodies: Liam had taken one look at his face when Deaton had picked up a scalpel—the three of them bent over a strange raised lump on Mr. Jeremy’s bicep—and had grabbed Nolan’s arm, and hauled him away. “You don’t need to be here for this,” he’d muttered as he’d deposited Nolan in the chair that he’s still sitting dutifully in, but his voice hadn’t been harsh or judgemental.

If anything, he’d sounded—Nolan staring stunned at his back as Liam had disappeared back into the exam room—a little _jealous._

Still, it’s coming up on an hour before anyone emerges from the room again. This time it’s Theo; Nolan can hear Liam and Deaton still quietly talking down the hallway, though he can’t make out what they’re saying. And anyway, he’s _fully_ distracted when Theo suddenly drops down into the chair next to him with a heartfelt groan.

“Scott and Malia will be here soon,” he informs Nolan.

Nolan’s not sure why Theo’s telling him this but he finds his throat tightening up around a grateful lump regardless. He looks down at his hands, and then reaches his fingers forward to start twisting them together. 

It takes him a moment to realize that the burning sensation against the side of his face is Theo watching him. He startles and glances over.

Theo just studies him for a few seconds longer, and then he plants both hands on his knees, and pushes himself up. He pauses when he’s on his feet, and looks back down at Nolan. “We’re going to be here for a while. You should get some sleep,” he nods towards the chairs, the instruction clear.

Nolan feels his lips twist but he can’t tell if it’s a frustrated grimace or an amused smile. “You keep telling me that,” he points out.

Theo’s eyebrows climb. “You keep needing it.”

Nolan bites back a laugh, can’t help it. Theo smirks back, the curve of it softer than Nolan’s gotten used to seeing on his face, and he starts to head back across the waiting room, towards the hallway that’ll take him to the exam room. Nolan’s lip had already been between his teeth and now he bites it _harder._

He calls, “Theo.”

Theo twists his head around so that he can look at Nolan over his shoulder, though he keeps the rest of his body facing forward. Nolan scrapes the heels of his palms over each other where they’re still dangling between his knees, and then he forces himself to meet Theo’s gaze fully.

He tells him, “Thank you. For—for—”

Nolan can’t quite finish the sentence, but Theo apparently doesn’t need him to. The fingers of his right hand suddenly twitch—the hand he’d had wrapped around Gabe’s face when Nolan had pleaded _don’t_ —and then he exhales out, low and rough.

“I just hope you don’t regret it later,” Theo replies, and then he turns back forward and finishes walking away.

Nolan stares after him, the silence of the waiting room and Nolan alone within it suddenly seeming heavy, muffling; oppressive.

He puts his head in his hands. He thinks, _me too._

\--- 

“This is idioitic,” Theo opines early the next morning, his hands braced wide on the dividing wall—the dividing wall made of _mountain ash_ —between the clinic’s waiting room and main office as he argues with Scott, and Liam, and Mason stood on the other side. Behind him in one of the waiting room chairs, Nolan says nothing, but Theo can tell he’s paying attention. “According to what Halwyn told Lydia, we’re supposed to keep both halves apart. We _know_ about one half. _Aaron._ We _don’t,_ ” he reminds everyone, “know _anything_ about this werewolf on the phone.”

There’s a silent stretch of seconds where everyone takes a moment to drop their eyes down to the phone in question sitting innocuously on a table between them. 

It’s Mason who speaks. “I’m not,” he starts, his breath hitching as the effort apparently jars his still-healing side; Liam adjusts his grip on Mason’s arm, and keeps siphoning his pain where they’re sitting side-by-side on top of Deaton’s desk, “I’m not agreeing with Theo—” Theo resists rolling his eyes, “—but I do think it’d be easier to track down Aaron over a voice on a phone.”

Theo squints at him. _That’s agreeing with me._

Liam makes a face. “That’s agreeing with Theo.”

Behind Theo, Nolan stifles a snorted laugh. Theo resists turning around to glare at him, even as Mason is acknowledging, “Yeah, but I thought I’d try to soften the blow a bit.”

Theo straightens some off of the dividing wall. “Is everyone _completely_ shocked that I might be right?”

“No,” Liam counters. “We just don’t like it.”

Theo sneers at him. Liam gives it right back.

Or he mostly does, anyway. There are thin lines of pain at the corners of his eyes as spidering black veins keep flowing out of Mason’s arm, and into Liam’s. Theo looks away.

“Maybe we’re _all_ right,” Scott offers. “Maybe we should be looking for both. Aaron _and_ the woman on the phone.” He looks pointedly at Theo, and then tips his head towards Mason. “And since you two agree…”

“No,” Theo refuses immediately, at the same time that Mason squawks, “Wait, me and _him?_ ”

“You two find Aaron,” Scott orders, like neither of them had spoken. “Liam and I will try and figure out whose voice is on the phone.” He sucks in, and then blows out, a rough, deep breath. “If we find either half, maybe we don’t have to fight at all.”

“Stop the Anuk-ite,” Liam realizes, his gaze snapping to Scott’s.

But it isn’t Scott who answers. “Stop the war,” Nolan breathes. 

He freezes when everyone twists around to stare reflexively at him, but then Scott nods. Theo turns back forward. He thinks about arguing.

He looks at those thin lines of pain at the corners of Liam’s eyes, and then doesn’t.

“Hey,” Scott murmurs later, as they’re getting ready to leave. He steps up close to Theo, so that they’re in as much of a quiet bubble as they can be, considering Liam is still roaming around the clinic somewhere. “Nolan’s got to go with you, you know that, right?”

Theo stares at him. “You want me to take him to go _find_ the half that we _know_ is the Anuk-ite. You want,” he presses, “me to take _both_ of them?” He jerks his chin pointedly at where Mason is leaning heavily against the dividing wall, one hand braced against his side.

“Nolan can’t come with us to the school,” Scott argues. “Not with how many of Monroe’s people are there. It’s too dangerous.”

“So have him stay _here,_ ” Theo counters. 

Scott eyes him levelly. “You really think that’s a good idea?”

Theo glares into the middle distance. “No,” he says shortly.

Scott claps him on the shoulder, and turns away. Theo blows out an explosive breath, and goes to head towards the clinic door, his mouth already opening to snap at both Mason and Nolan to hurry up and follow him. But he doesn’t get more than a few steps before he’s dragged to another halt.

He twists around to look at Liam. “What?” He wonders. He’d meant it to be sharp, but something about the look on Liam’s face stops him, and it comes out soft-edged instead.

Liam’s eyes flick over Theo’s shoulder, to Mason. They flick back. “If anything happens to him…” Liam says, and he’d probably meant it to come off as a _threat,_ but it—doesn’t. Theo feels something in his chest cramp up.

He looks straight at Liam. He says, “It won’t.”

Liam searches his eyes for a single second; two. He nods.

He releases Theo’s arm.

The tunnels are exactly as dank and disgusting as Theo remembers them being from the _last_ time he was here, and he spends a few seconds glowering around at the damp walls when his feet hit the floor at the bottom of the ladder down from the water treatment plant. But then he has to refocus, because Mason starts climbing down, and he’s still shaky—no matter that he keeps trying to _hide_ that fact—and Theo’s genuinely not sure if he’s going to have to _catch_ Mason if and when he slips, and falls. 

It turns out he doesn’t: Mason manages to make it to the ground on his own, and the look he shoots Theo once he has is close-mouthed, venomous; Theo can hear his teeth grinding, Mason has his jaw clenched so hard. Theo looks back at him, and then flicks his gaze upwards as Nolan starts to climb down. 

The look Mason gives Nolan once Nolan has joined them isn’t any friendlier. Theo bites back a frustrated noise, and starts to lead the way through the tunnels.

They make slow progress. For one thing, the tunnels are winding and they _reek,_ which means Theo has to stop every now and then and spend precious minutes trying to untangle the various scents, looking for some hint of Aaron—of the _Anuk-ite—_ underneath it all.

For another: “You know,” Theo finally comments, peering down the stretch of one tunnel even as he addresses Mason behind him. “If you keep focusing all your energy on being pissed at us—” because Mason can’t seem to decide if he wants to keep Nolan in front of him where Mason can seemingly keep an eye on him, or _behind_ him, where Mason could conceivably forget he was there, “—then you’re going to be too distracted to be of much use if and when we find Aaron.”

Mason stiffens; Theo can tell from the slight _scrape_ his shoe gives on the rough concrete floor. “ _Forgive me,_ ” he finally hisses, “if I find it a little difficult to just look past _attempted murder._ ”

Nolan sucks in a sharp breath. Theo grits his teeth.

He twists his head around on his neck so he can meet Nolan’s eyes. “He’s talking about me, not you,” Theo assures him, and then he twists his head the other way so he can meet _Mason’s_ eyes as he counters, “And last I checked, Scott’s _fine._ ”

The sharp breath that Nolan had sucked in leaves him in a surprised _whoosh_ as he apparently puts those pieces together. Theo _ruthlessly_ smothers the uncomfortable squirming thing that starts up in his chest.

And then he ceases walking forward altogether when Mason snaps back, “I can name a few others who _aren’t._ ”

His nostrils flare. His upper lip starts to curl up, and away from his teeth. But when he twists around to face Mason, Mason isn’t even looking at him. He’s glaring at _Nolan._

“And just because Liam walked away doesn’t mean that _anyone_ has forgotten about what you and your lackeys did to him,” he snaps. Or tries to, anyway. It comes out breathier than he’d probably intended; Mason hunching over some as the force of his ire aggravates his still healing side.

Still, Nolan looks _stricken._ “I’m sorry,” he whispers, his expression _raw._

Mason just stares incredulously back at him. “You’re _sor—_ ” He starts to demand.

Theo cuts him off before he can finish. “Well, we’re clearly in the right place,” he forces himself to drawl, though keeping the shearing mess in his chest off his face—out of his voice—takes effort. “Or do you not realize this is the Anuk-ite?”

He lets his eyes drift down to take in Mason’s fierce expression, his shaking limbs. The look on Mason’s face briefly blanks as he apparently considers Theo’s claim, but then it tightens right back up. He shakes his head.

“You think it being the Anuk-ite makes it any less _true?_ ” He demands, his eyes _burning_ on Theo’s face. “I _saw_ what you did to Liam.” He flicks his gaze to Nolan, who shrinks back. “I saw what _you_ did to _Scott_.” He returns his attention to Theo. “So as much as I’m _terrified_ of what’s down here, I’m _way more_ terrified of turning my back on _you._ ”

And he doesn’t. On _either_ of them; the way he’s positioned himself, he’s standing between Theo on his left and Nolan on his right, his eyes dragging between both of them. Theo grits his teeth. He can feel his _own_ limbs starting to shake with the effort of holding back the _snarl_ he wants to give as Mason’s accusations eat away at him, a prickling defensive _anger_ bubbling up between his ribs, soaking into his lungs, his heart.

His _sister’s_ heart.

But. 

But: _it’s why you get angry when you’re afraid._ Theo feels his eyes widen as he realizes, and the shift surge under his skin as _panic_ burns fast and hard through him. He must lose control of some part of it: Mason’s expression blows wide as Theo lunges for him, his arms coming up as if to ward off an attack.

Theo barely manages to tackle him back out of the way of Aaron’s strike as Aaron brings a broken length of pipe arching down right where Mason had been standing.

They crash into the opposite wall of the tunnel and Mason gives a harsh cry as his still-healing side apparently protests. Theo swears but can’t focus on it: Aaron had spun around like he was going to make another run at Mason, except that Theo is now standing in between them.

But _Nolan._

Aaron turns, the jagged end of the broken off pipe in his hands visible even in the uneven lighting of the tunnels, and starts to swing. “Nolan, get _down!_ ” Theo yells, _shoving_ himself off the wall at the same time that _he_ arcs a clawed hand forward, and _rakes_ it down the unprotected stretch of Aaron’s back.

Aaron cries out and drops the pipe, but that’s not what gets Theo’s attention. A sudden furious _roar_ echoes throughout the tunnels. He freezes.

 _Aaron_ freezes, and then he glances back at Theo still half-crouched and with his bloody claws crooked and ready, and he _grins._ He takes off down the tunnels, Nolan throwing himself to the side to avoid the collision with a startled gasp. Theo starts to rush to his feet to follow, and then he stops. He twists around to look at Mason, and swears.

“C’mon,” he orders roughly, hurrying to where Mason had crumpled down against the wall and starting to pull him up. “We’ve got to find him.”

Mason nods shakily and starts trying to help, but the second he gets more than a few inches off the ground he collapses right back down with a bitten off cry. “I can’t,” he pants. “I can’t.”

He’s holding his side, where the bullet had torn through when Gabe had attacked the McCall house. Theo grits his teeth, his mind racing. His head jerks up as Nolan makes his way slowly over, his face creased with his concern. Theo looks back down at Mason. He swears again.

“I can’t leave you two,” he says, though he’s not even sure who he’s saying it _to:_ Mason and Nolan, or himself. His right forearm tingles like Liam’s fingers are still wrapped around it, Liam saying: _if something happens to him…_

His eyes widen. His mind pulls up the memory of how the stark black lines had flowed from Mason’s arm into Liam’s, Mason’s breathing getting easier and easier as they went. He switches his gaze from Mason’s face to his arm, shoving the sleeve of his shirt out of the way. He wraps his fingers around Mason’s bare skin.

But nothing happens. Theo stares in confusion. _C’mon,_ he thinks, trying again. Trying _harder_. He _knows_ how to do this: the Doctors’ had spent _months_ studying the ability one time, curious, curious, curious, and Theo had been the closest—and most _cooperative_ —subject they had.

But nothing happens.

Theo can feel Mason’s gaze on the top of his head. “You can’t take pain if you don’t care,” Mason tells him, quiet and almost—pitying.

Theo jerks his eyes upwards to meet Mason’s. He still hasn’t let go of Mason’s arm.

But then he has to, because Aaron reappears in the tunnel mouth. Theo surges to his feet, one arm automatically reaching out to grab Nolan, and throw him back behind himself. Aaron starts to advance.

“Wait,” Mason suddenly breathes. “Wait, that roar from before—!”

Aaron starts to run.

“Theo, wait!” Mason yells. “Don’t fight him! That’s what he—”

 _Wants._ Mason’s sentence ends _that’s what he wants,_ but it’s too late: Aaron takes advantage of Theo’s distraction and barrels into him, sending them crashing back into the opposite tunnel wall. Theo cries out at the impact and lifts an elbow to _drive_ it down against Aaron’s back, breaking his grip.

Somewhere in the distance, that same roar comes again.

 _Shit,_ Theo silently swears, shoving Aaron back and then lifting a foot to _thrust_ him forcefully away. Aaron stumbles backwards but that roar doesn’t come again. 

Aaron’s expression twists in frustration.

And then his eyes flick around to Mason on one side of Theo, and Nolan on the other. He looks back at Theo.

He _grins._

Theo curses and lunges forward to intercept him as Aaron darts towards Mason. But the second he _does,_ Aaron suddenly reverses direction and throws himself towards _Nolan._ Theo has no choice: he drops and kicks out a foot, _slamming_ it against the side of Aaron’s leg.

Aaron falls with a cry several feet short of Nolan.

That _roar_ comes again.

“Nolan, _move!_ ” Theo orders, but it’s not going to be enough and he knows it. Even as Nolan is scrabbling backwards on his heels and palms, Aaron is scrambling _after_ him, one hand outstretched.

There’s nothing for it. Theo lunges forward and tackles Aaron down, _driving_ the claws of one of his hands down into Aaron’s back. Aaron _shouts._

Someone _roars._

 _Kill him,_ Theo screams at himself. He has to _kill him,_ or Aaron was going to go run off and merge with his apparently _supremely_ pissed-off other half, and then _they_ were going to kill everyone _else._ He yanks his clawed fingers free of Aaron’s back, and raises them to bring them down in a strike towards the back of Aaron’s neck.

But Aaron suddenly heaves him sideways, off of himself. And not just _heaves:_ he sends Theo _hurtling_ into the tunnel wall. The impact is enough to break several of Theo’s ribs and he hits the ground _gasping,_ unable to draw in even a single breath of air.

Through his swimming vision, he can see Aaron take off back down the tunnel mouth, and disappear.

“Shit,” he pants, even as Nolan is scrambling over to him on his hands and knees, and then sitting back on his heels with a helpless look on his face as his hands hover over Theo’s body, Nolan clearly uncertain what, if anything, he should do. Theo’s eyes flick to Mason’s to find his expression twisted in equal hopelessness. 

“ _Shit._ ”

\---

It’s probably a sign of his ongoing, seemingly-perpetual shock, but the first thing that Nolan notices when they get back to the McCall—battered, bruised, and with Theo at least absently licking blood from the corner of his mouth—is that someone has literally duct-taped over the bullet holes in the plaster torn through the house’s walls. An additional someone—maybe the same someone, but quite possibly someone else, because Nolan is beginning to realize that the McCall house is a never-ending hive of activity, someone, _the pack,_ always around—has jammed a poorly cut square of cardboard into the broken window, and sealed it with that same duct tape. No one seems particularly thrown by it.

Nolan is thrown by it.

But he snaps out of it, because Theo is irritable, distracted—but not _injured,_ because he’d of course healed from his broken ribs within fifteen minutes—and he’s doing a half-assed job of helping Mason into the house as a result. In fact, he seems to not want to _look_ at Mason, really: every time he does he gets this look on his face like he’s being confronted with a truth he doesn’t like, and he half-snarls and looks away again.

It means Nolan is the one who mostly supports Mason into the house, Mason’s arm over his shoulder and Nolan’s fingers anchored around his opposite waist, doing his absolute best not to aggravate Mason’s injury from when Gabe had—

From when Gabe had shot up the McCall house, thinking Nolan was inside.

“Thanks,” Mason gasps breathily out when he and Nolan finally make it to the couch, and Nolan can lower him carefully down onto the cushions. He sounds genuine, not even a little begrudging, and Nolan wonders at that because he can still remember the exact furious shape of Mason’s mouth as he’d glared at Nolan and promised him that _no one_ had forgotten what Nolan and _his lackeys_ had done to Liam.

It starts up this uncomfortable squirming thing in Nolan’s chest, this insidious question like he can’t trust his own mind. The Anuk-ite feeds off fear, the McCall pack keeps saying, and even more so Theo had explained that the Anuk-ite _twists_ fear, but Nolan had been afraid—non-stop, every minute of every day—ever since that day in the library, and he doesn’t like the idea of not knowing which part of that is real. 

Which part belongs to him, and which part to the Anuk-ite; to Gabe; to Monroe or to someone else.

He’s broken out of his thoughts when Liam thunders down the stairs, though, because Liam takes one look at Mason hunched painfully over his injured side, and he turns on Theo. His eyes immediately flare. “What the _hell!_ ” He demands, and for this perfect absurdist moment Nolan thinks with absolute clarity that Liam is going to put Theo through the nearest wall, and no poorly-cut cardboard box will be able to serve as an adequate patch for the resulting damage.

Especially not when Theo immediately starts to snarl back, his own eyes flaring but something going _loose_ in his limbs at the same time, not tight, like he found the opportunity for a fight a _relief._

But Mason interrupts before they can actually, physically clash. “It’s not his fault,” he manages to gasp out, Nolan moving instinctively closer because Mason’s clearly still hurting. Mason shoots him this tiny grateful smile—so tiny it shouldn’t register like the gut-punch that it does—and then refocuses on Liam, who’d paused mid-threatening step to squint at him in confusion. “He couldn’t fight Aaron _and_ protect me and Nolan at the same time.”

Theo’s expression blanks with surprise; he clearly hadn’t expected to be defended. The tense line of his shoulders deflates like a pricked balloon, and in the absence of it he just looks—lost, somehow. Awash in the sea of the McCall house and the McCall pack moving around him, Scott and Malia and Lydia appearing from upstairs and through the front door and converging and breaking apart in unpredictable ways, the apparent sideshow of Theo-and-Liam left ignored; expected maybe. Commonplace. 

Liam hesitates for a second, and then _he_ seems to slump, too. His head tilts down and then, more surprisingly, he looks up at Theo from underneath a ducked brow. He admits, “We screwed up with our half, too,” and pulls out his phone to offer it to Theo, the screen unlocked.

Theo takes it after a second. 

He ends up huddled around the couch with Mason and Nolan and Liam, Theo bent over the couch back so that Mason and Nolan can see the phone screen and Liam crouched in front of them. They all stare at the stone-statue bodies in the pictures in equal bafflement and horror.

“Oh, well,” Mason opines blankly. “That explains why Halwyn warned Lydia not to look at it, sure.”

The faces of the statues aren’t Gabe’s, but they _are_ two hunters that Nolan remembers Gabe traipsing around town with. 

He swallows.

“Fucking _fantastic,_ ” Theo mutters, his fingers still wrapped around Liam’s phone for whatever reason. Mason had been the last to speak but Theo’s still looking at Liam, and Liam’s still looking up at him. Theo demands, “What the hell are we supposed to do _now?_ ”

The answer, apparently: make frozen pizzas.

Several of them, jammed Tetris-style into the freezer half of the McCall refrigerator and pulled out and unboxed and unwrapped with the ease of long practice. It’s _absurd,_ and in the philosophical sense: _relating to or supporting the belief that human beings exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe._ Every single one of them, from Scott carefully slotting frozen pizzas onto individual racks in the oven, to Malia handing them over one by one, to Lydia and Liam taking turns to break them loose of their packaging, are all under a literal death sentence, but as Mason explains with a shrug when he sees Nolan staring, “We’ve still got to eat.”

Nolan supposes that’s true. His eyes flick to the duct-taped bullet holes, the inexpertly—or just _disinterestedly_ —patched window. Tragedies were tragedies but the mundane still required adherence; the pack still had to have some place to retreat to.

It still has to eat.

The pizza gets divided up, and supplemented with mismatched cans of soda and seltzer and whatever else Scott and Liam—digging through the garage and basement respectively—can find. 

It’s the weariest war council Nolan has ever seen. The members of the pack who are there gather around the living room on whatever pieces of furniture they can find, Liam making himself at home in an armchair that’s leaking stuffing from several bullet holes torn through the fabric. Malia kicks away the shattered remnants of a broken kitchen chair and drops right down onto the floor, and when Scott sits down on a free stretch of couch behind her, she slumps back against his legs. 

They lay out their troops, Nolan feeling that same stunned unease that he’d experienced watching them pull frozen pizzas out of the freezer in a house covered in bullet holes and plaster dust. He wonders how many times it takes for a group like this—a _pack_ like this—to experience some unrelenting, life-altering tragedy for it to become this self-evidently _mundane._

He wonders if they’d tell him, if he asked.

When he looks up after thinking that, Liam is watching him. Nolan flushes, but he—doesn’t look away, at least not until Liam does.

“Deucalion said he’d help me and Malia,” Scott is saying, Nolan’s mind automatically filling in: _Deucalion, son of Prometheus._ “Since we can’t look at the Anuk-ite, and all,” he clarifies, and the rest of the pack nods sagely, if wearily.

“Peter’s...somewhere,” Malia adds, and this time the gathered pack all make faces, their expressions caught somewhere in the inexact middle of bemused resignation and banked fury. 

“Argent?” Lydia wonders.

“Looking for Derek,” Scott replies.

Through it all, Theo says nothing. He _does_ nothing, except lean back in his chosen chair and watch the goings-on through hooded eyes. After a while Nolan finds himself watching _Theo_ more than watching the others, and Theo notices: he looks back. 

Except, of course, when he looks at Liam.

“Well, there’s nothing more that we can do for tonight,” Scott finally declares, and claps both hands down on his knees as he straightens to his feet. He says _can’t_ but what Nolan thinks he means is _shouldn’t,_ and Nolan wonders how long it took him to learn to be patient. Malia and Liam are both shifting with this banked potential kind of energy, the kind that Scott could ignite with a single _word,_ and instead Scott does the opposite. “We should all get some rest.”

Malia and Liam both _visibly_ slump. Nolan wonders if they realize that they’d done it, all that potential just immediately evaporating with a single sentence from Scott, like he’d given them permission. Permission to be as exhausted as they clearly _are;_ Liam rubs his face against the side of his arm.

“We should probably spread out,” he opines dryly, and gives a pointed look towards the—towards the taped-over bullet holes ripped through the walls. 

The gallows humor causes Nolan’s breath to catch but it causes Scott’s to do the opposite. It leaves Scott in a rush as he laughs quietly, and nods, and agrees.

He and Malia retreat upstairs. Lydia goes home after giving repeated promises that she’ll be careful. “Humans in the basement,” Scott declares, and smiles sympathetically at Mason and Nolan when they glance up at him. Behind him, Liam collapses with a low groan across the couch, and Theo settles a little more firmly into the armchair he’d ended up sitting in.

Still, it takes a little while for everyone to get settled as instructed, mostly because the house’s occupants currently outnumber its bathrooms. Mason stays upstairs with Liam, trading off getting ready for bed using the bathroom down the hallway from the kitchen. 

Theo stands brushing his teeth in the basement bathroom, backlit by the naked bulbs over the sink, while Nolan sits on the futon he and Mason will be splitting and tries—and fails—not to watch him through the open doorway.

He’s wearing a different shirt from the one he’d been wearing in the tunnels; that one had been a lost cause, covered in sewer grime and filth and speckles of blood from when Theo had leaned over and _spat_ out a mouthful of the stuff after he’d climbed back onto his feet after Aaron had thrown him into that wall. By his elbow there’s the sad empty shell of the plastic packaging his toothbrush had come in, Liam yanking out two—Nolan is holding his own—from a literal _pile_ of them stored loosely in a box in the cabinets underneath the sink in the upstairs bathroom. 

Theo leans over the sink and spits. He spends a few seconds rinsing out his mouth, and when he straightens it’s only halfway. His eyes catch Nolan’s in the mirror, and narrow. Nolan drops his own.

But it’s too late. Theo shuts off the water, and pivots around so his back is to the sink instead. He raises his eyebrows in clear challenge when Nolan’s gaze darts helplessly up to sneak a look at him.

He doesn’t say _what,_ because he doesn’t need to. Nolan swallows, and quietly says, “Yesterday. You were so determined to keep Liam from—” he tries, but he can’t say _killing Gabe,_ so instead he says, “—doing something he would have regretted.”

Theo stiffens just a _fraction._ It’s not obvious but Nolan’s really _looking_ at him, so even though Theo’s whole posture eases right back out the next second, Nolan still catches it. Theo tips his head just the slightest bit sideways. “That’s a statement, not a question.”

Nolan winces. He looks down at his hands, his fingers clenched hard enough around his still-packaged toothbrush that the plastic crackles and snaps. 

“You weren’t going to let _Liam_ do it,” Nolan repeats, his eyes on his knuckles gone white with the force of his grip, “but _you_ almost. _You_ were going to—” He doesn’t know how to finish his sentence. He trails off.

He looks up.

Theo is watching him, his expression unreadable. “Still not a question,” he points out neutrally.

Nolan sucks in a deep breath. He blurts out, “Would _you_ have regretted it?” before he can lose his nerve.

Theo blinks, clearly taken aback. He stares back at Nolan as Nolan stares at _him,_ his mouth dropped softly open. 

But then his mouth closes. It _twists,_ right up into the same kind of smirk that Theo had given Nolan back in the basement of Monroe’s warehouse what feels like an approximate—a _different_ —lifetime ago. This time, in the bright lights of the McCall house, Nolan notices how it doesn’t touch his eyes.

“You heard Gabe at the zoo,” Theo answers, his voice the same kind of _drawl_ that it’d been back in the warehouse, too. But it echoes strangely in the confines of the McCall basement; hollow-sounding and empty. “I’m a spy, a _liar._ Some,” Theo’s smirk sharpens, “freak science experiment.”

A muscle in the corner of his jaw jumps, tiny and nearly invisible. He turns around abruptly and starts gathering up the packaging from his toothbrush, and straightening up the rest of the counter.

“Like Mason so helpfully pointed out earlier in the tunnels,” he concludes, speaking it more to his hands and the sink and his own reflection in the mirror than to Nolan, “it wouldn’t have been the first time.”

Nolan bites his lip. “That’s not what I asked.”

Theo’s eyes snap to Nolan’s in the mirror. His expression is tight, a little twisted up. He should probably feel the opposite, but Nolan finds it easier to look at him _now_ than when Theo had been wearing that sharp smirk, speaking in that sharp drawl, so he keeps doing it.

It’s _Theo_ who ends up looking away. Dropping his eyes, his whole head falling down and to the side until Nolan can see the full length of the back of his bared neck. A few seconds pass with them just like that, and then Theo shakes his head slightly and exhales out a rough breath that even _Nolan_ can hear, the silence in the basement that complete.

“I don’t know,” Theo admits, low and quiet, and then before Nolan can say anything—if he even knew what to _say_ —Theo is spinning around and hitting the bathroom light, and heading towards the stairs back up to the main floor, all in one smooth sequence of movements. He doesn’t slow and he doesn’t say anything else; not a good night or a barked order or anything. Nolan stares after him even _after_ Theo has slammed the door at the top of the stairs back shut.

But Mason’s going to be down any minute, and so Nolan stands, and makes his way over to the bathroom, his own still-packaged toothbrush in hand. He leaves the lightswitch alone once he reaches it, though, because there’s enough light spilling into the tiny room from the light over the stairs for him to see his hands, and the packaging of the toothbrush as he breaks it open, but not enough for him to see the bruises still dotting his face, even when he looks directly at his reflection in the mirror.

Still, he tries not to look.

\---

Theo wakes up with the dawn because there’s a beam of sunlight shining right against his closed eyelids, but he doesn’t know why—or when—Liam does. He blinks rapidly a few times, his eyes feeling gummy and unfocused, and then he squints at Liam across the McCall house living room.

Liam tips his head down, and sideways, to look back. His expression is unreadable only in the sense that Theo doesn’t know what put it there, not that he can’t recognize it. 

He waits for Liam to say whatever it is.

And Liam does, but not without looking away first. His eyes drag up to the ceiling and he stares at it—Theo can see them roving, and has to physically resist the urge to turn his own head and follow, to _see_ what Liam is seeing—before he lets his chin fall back sideways, so he’s once more watching Theo. Theo fights not to stiffen and barely succeeds.

“You going to leave again?” Liam wonders, and he’s really _wondering;_ his voice is quiet, not an accusation. He sounds genuinely curious. He clarifies, “After whatever happens today, I mean.”

The only reason that Theo manages not to react is because he’d _already_ been focused on not reacting. Liam’s eyes don’t leave his face and they have just the slightest flecks of gold in them; Liam half- or subconsciously shifting to better see Theo in the dim gray light spilling in through the few windows that remain intact on the McCall house main floor. There are a million answers Theo could give but they’d all invite replies that he’s not sure he wants to hear, so instead he snorts a laugh and turns to look up at the ceiling himself.

“I’m not even sure there’s going to _be_ an after,” he points out.

Liam lets him get away with that very specific deflection but walks him right into a trap, which in hindsight, Theo thinks, had probably always been the question he’d _actually_ wanted to ask. “So then why haven’t you _already_ left?” He challenges.

His eyes aren’t just _flecked_ with gold anymore. This time when he’d spoken he’d rolled up on one elbow to better stare at Theo across the way, and his mouth is set in a thin line. Theo stares back, his ribcage suddenly feeling about two times too small to house his frozen lungs, and his pounding heart.

And then he startles and hisses out a harsh sound, all that stale air rushing right out of him, because Malia appears at the top of the stairs and heads down them loudly enough to break right through the stand-off. She slows to a stop on her way to the kitchen, and eyes first Theo and then Liam suspiciously.

“What’s wrong with you two?” She demands, her nostrils flaring.

Liam’s jaw clenches. He’d dropped the shift away from his eyes when Malia had appeared, either deliberately or due to surprise, but he still squeezes them shut like he needs to clear them of the remnants of it. He throws back the thin blanket he’d dragged over himself off of the back of the couch last night, and stands.

“Nothing,” he mutters to Malia as he passes her. “There’s nothing.”

Malia watches him disappear into the kitchen, and then twists around to look at Theo. Theo just stares silently back.

By the time Scott comes downstairs a few minutes later, Liam has already gotten a pot of coffee started, and Malia has already found and demolished a pack of toaster pastries she finds in the back of a cabinet. She pulls out another silver-wrapped package and wiggles it at Scott when he appears, and then—when Scott shakes his head with a small smile—she tosses it to Nolan just stepping into the kitchen from the basement. Nolan manages to catch it, but only _after_ he’s stumbled back into Mason behind him, who steadies him with a laugh. Theo looks away.

He keeps very determinedly looking anywhere and everywhere _but_ at Liam.

Scott’s phone pings as he’s pulling mugs down from a cabinet and handing them, assembly-line style, to Liam to fill. He pauses and fishes it from his sweatpants’ pocket, and then frowns down at it.

“What is it?” Liam wonders, catching the look on his face.

“My mom,” Scott answers, his voice sounding absent as he clearly reads his mom’s message for the second or third time. “She says there’s something going on at the hospital. She can’t get close enough to see what it is because Monroe’s people are there, but she thinks…” He trails off, and blows out a rough breath. “We need to check it out.”

He drops his phone and looks from Liam to Malia, whose jaw tightens.

“You two have to get to the storage yards,” Liam points out. “Theo and I—”

Theo jerks, Liam’s unexpected inclusion of him catching him off-guard. He looks up to find Liam already side-eyeing him, his expression tight.

But: “No,” Scott interrupts. He shakes his head lightly when Liam glances over, his brow furrowing. “No,” Scott repeats, and his eyes flick to Theo’s. “I need Theo to do something else.”

Theo experiences something that feels uncomfortably like _dread_ start to solidify in his gut. 

“Take Nolan,” Scott orders, turning back to Liam. He switches his attention to Mason next. “Go find Corey,” he instructs him, “and meet them there.”

Mason nods. Nolan _doesn’t,_ his face going pale even in the already-anemic early-morning sunlight. It makes the bruises on his face stand out even more starkly, the edges of them just starting to turn yellow. Theo watches his throat bob as he swallows, and then his eyes are drawn back towards Liam as Liam tries, “Scott—”

“Go,” Scott cuts off him, his tone firm. There’s no alpha _oomph_ to it, but then again—Scott’s rarely ever needed there to be. Liam’s jaw snaps shut. 

He snags two already-filled mugs and holds one out towards Nolan even as he’s passing him on the way out of the kitchen, and towards the front door. “Let’s go,” he mutters at Nolan, and Nolan—after pausing to shoot a quick, uncertain look at Theo—turns to follow.

Mason steps up to the counter, and grabs his own mug. “I’ll go find Corey,” he explains quietly, and then he’s gone, too.

Theo keeps right on leaning against the counter where he’d settled, and waits. Scott spends a few seconds staring after Mason, and Nolan, and Liam, and then, even when he turns to look at Theo, he glances at Malia first. The dread in Theo’s gut solidifies a little more.

“If we can’t defeat the Anuk-ite,” Scott starts. “If we can’t stop the _fear,_ then…”

He trails off. Theo flicks his own eyes up to meet Scott’s, his jaw still tight.

“We need to know where Monroe’s people are,” Scott says. “We need to know _how many_ they are, and what they’re doing.”

 _We need to prepare to go to war,_ he doesn’t say, but then again: he doesn’t have to.

Before there are wars, there are _spies._ Theo closes his eyes, very carefully, and then pushes himself up off the counter with his arms. 

“What do you want me to do?” He asks, the dread in his gut transmuting into a leaden sort of resignation that starts crawling its way up his spine. 

“Find them,” Scott answers. “ _Track_ them. Help us understand exactly what we’re up against.”

Theo nods, and then looks away. He knows the next question he has to ask but he has no desire to ask it. _Would_ you _have regretted it?_ Nolan had asked him last night, and he’d been talking about Theo’s decision-or-not to kill Gabe, but the same twisting uncertainty is back and tangling up all of Theo’s insides. 

“And if I see an opportunity to even our odds?” He finally forces himself to wonder, at the same time that he forces himself to turn back to Scott. He could be talking about sabotage, guerilla tactics, but they both know that’s not what he means. Scott’s jaw clenches.

“I can’t ask you to do that,” he says. Then, more firmly: “I’m _not_ asking you to do that.”

He’s not asking, but he knows _who_ he’s asking. Theo wonders if he understands the difference, and how very little of one there actually is. He grabs one of the last filled mugs of coffee, and heads towards the front door, just like Liam and Nolan and Mason—Scott’s _troops,_ even if he doesn’t want to think of them as such—had before him.

“Yes, sir,” he mutters as he passes Scott, and even _he_ doesn’t know if the sarcasm in his voice is real or feigned.

\---

Liam goes to round a corner in the hospital and then immediately jerks back, hissing out a frustrated, “ _shit,_ ” between his teeth. He’d collided back with Nolan—who’d maybe been following him a little _too_ closely—when he’d moved, and he doesn’t bother to adjust, so Nolan can literally _feel_ the irritated huff of breath he gives before he mutters, “How many goddamn people does Monroe _have_ here? This thing Melissa discovered must be a big deal.”

He says it like a fact because the alternative is to turn it into a question with an answer neither of them are likely to like: if it _isn’t_ a big deal, and Monroe has this many people at the hospital, then why are her people _actually_ here? Liam’s eyes flick back over his shoulder and catch Nolan’s, and Nolan can see him thinking the same thing.

Can see him hovering on the edge of _concluding_ the same thing that Nolan has, though neither of them dares say it out-loud. It’s superstition, maybe, or something else; something that Liam, who’s survived _several_ more of these world-ending apocalyptic-type scenarios than Nolan, understands better than him. Either way, the key seems to be to starve the potential catastrophe of oxygen; deny it air. Liam’s jaw works. He peers back around the corner.

His fingers fit themselves around Nolan’s wrist, and yank him forward. “C’mon.”

He leads them undetected through the hospital through a seeming combination of familiarity with the building, and his supernatural senses. His eyes don’t flare but the way his head cocks, the way his nostrils flare: they _had_ —they _must have_ —shifted to help him hear, and smell, and therefore _avoid_ Monroe’s people scattered throughout the hospital. 

It takes nearly twenty minutes of stop-and-start, winding progress, but finally they make it up to the fourth floor, and to the room Melissa had indicated Monroe’s people seemed to be so interested in. _Then why is it unguarded?_ Nolan wonders, even as he’s ducking through the doors after Liam. He glances at Liam as the doors swing back shut behind them, wanting to gauge whether _Liam_ is once again thinking the same thing he is, but then he stops, because he catches the look on Liam’s face.

It’s soft-edged and stunned; more than a little hurt-looking. His eyes are _fixed_ on the three figures laid out in parallel hospital beds, _all_ of them with their faces covered by bulging plastic oxygen masks and with wires trailing up from their arms to IV bags hanging by the forlornly beeping heart rate monitors beside them. Nolan squints. Backlit by the equipment, the liquid in the bags looks _purple_.

Liam takes a single step forward, and then another. He twists his body sideways so that he can fit in between two of the beds without the slightest risk of disturbing either of the occupants, and then he reaches forward for one of the strangely-colored IV bags. “You know what it is,” Nolan realizes.

“It’s wolfsbane,” Liam answers, his voice eerily flat. The shadowed line of his jaw shifts as his teeth clench. 

_Which means they’re werewolves,_ Nolan thinks, his eyes falling back down to the figures in the bed. Something painful twists in his gut as he watches the too-slow—the _too-shallow_ —rise and subsequent fall of the nearest werewolf’s chest. 

And then he’s jerking and yelping out, “Wait!”

Liam freezes, his fingers hovering over the bend of one of the werewolf’s elbows, just over where the IV is connected. His eyes narrow as he hisses, “We can’t just _leave them_ like—”

“You don’t know what will happen,” Nolan interrupts shakily. _Insistently._ “You don’t know what’s already been _done_ to them, doing this could—”

He cuts himself off because Liam snaps his teeth; that same lupine, sharp-fanged gesture of frustration. But instead of finding it frightening this time, Nolan finds himself exhaling out a relieved breath, because it means that Liam’s going to do exactly what he does: step back away from the comatose werewolf.

 _Listen_ to Nolan.

“Well, what do _you—_ ” Liam starts to snarl, and then his head whips around.

And winds up looking straight down the barrel of the gun that one of the figures— _not_ a werewolf, _not_ a werewolf, Nolan just keeps thinking on a useless, _panicked_ loop—points right between his eyes. 

The man fires.

Nolan _shouts_ as blood _fountains_ from the side of Liam’s head, but even as it is, Liam is _snarling_ and reaching forward— _he’d moved,_ Nolan realizes blankly; Liam had somehow _moved out of the way of the bullet_ —to grab the gunman’s outstretched arms, and _yank_ him forward. There’s red _streaming_ down the side of Liam’s face from the apparent bullet graze but it doesn’t stop Liam from twisting and _throwing_ the gunman off of the bed, and over his hip, and _through_ —the gunman sliding across the floor with a cracked, wounded cry—the room’s doors. 

Liam doesn’t pause, just rushes after him. Nolan has just enough time to see that the bullet graze marking Liam’s temple has already healed, and then he has to turn and hurry after Liam. 

But he grinds to a stop almost immediately after, because—

Because he and Liam are staring down a hallway filled with Monroe’s hunters. They don’t seem particularly concerned with their comrade groaning and clearly struggling to draw a full breath at Liam’s feet: all of their attention—and their _weapons_ —are fixed on Liam, and Nolan behind him. The lead hunter— _Richmond,_ Nolan’s mind dredges up—grins.

“Well,” he says. “This isn’t _exactly_ how we were hoping this would work out, but looks like we’re still going to manage to take McCall’s pet beta off the board.” 

He rolls his shoulders, a performative little gesture, and resettles the barrel of his rifle so that it’s pointing right between Liam’s eyes. Liam takes a tiny, nearly imperceptible half-step backwards. It very nearly carries him into Nolan, who takes his own reflexive step back to avoid it. Nolan feels like someone is sitting on his chest, his eyes flicking from one sleek-barreled rifle held by each of Monroe’s hunters to the next. Liam takes another tiny step back, Nolan stumbling to do the same. His breaths are still coming short and shallow.

And then they stop altogether, because Richmond suddenly orders, “ _Move,_ Nolan.”

“What?” Nolan blurts out, can’t stop it.

“ _Move,_ ” Richmond repeats, more sharply this time. His attention—and his rifle—never wavers from Liam, but his mouth twists like he’s tasting something foul. “Gabe made a deal with Monroe. _You_ aren’t to be harmed. So,” he orders, one final, _dangerous_ time, “ _move._ ”

“No,” Nolan denies, the refusal out of his mouth almost before Richmond is done speaking. Liam’s head whips around sideways and Nolan can _see_ the surprise there. He looks back. He grits his teeth. He takes a step _closer_ to Liam, and repeats:

“ _No._ ”

Richmond’s upper lip starts to curl, visible even behind the barrel of his rifle. He lifts his head up just enough to glare directly at Nolan, his jaw working. Behind him, the rest of Monroe’s people shift uneasily on their feet.

“Well,” Richmond concludes, his eyes glittering in the harsh fluorescents of the hallway. “I guess we’ll just have to tell Gabe that his boyfriend made his choice.”

He starts to tip his head back down, clearly about to rest it back along his rifle so that he could sight down it. So that he could sight _Liam_ down it.

But Liam doesn’t cooperate.

His little steps back had apparently been calculated. There’s a rolling cot tucked away against one of the hallway walls and Liam had guided them back behind it while Richmond and Nolan were arguing, and _now,_ _supernaturally_ fast, he grabs the edge of it and sends it _rocketing_ down the hallway towards Richmond and the other hunters. 

They shout and scatter, Richmond’s shot going wide.

But Nolan barely registers any of it, because he feels two hands between his shoulder blades, _shoving_ him sideways and down a branching hallway. Nolan trips and hits the ground hard on his palms, and rolls over onto his back just in time to see Liam drop low on his haunches, his mouth open in a _furious,_ full-shifted snarl as he _roars._

His eyes cut sideways after, golden and burning. “ _Go!_ ” He orders Nolan.

“But—!” Nolan tries, gasping it out.

A single gunshot tears through the silence and embeds itself in the wall just behind Liam, his arms coming up to cross over his face to protect it as shards of plaster fly backwards towards him. 

“I can’t protect you and fight them at the same time!” Liam yells, and Nolan has a brief, _clear_ flash of Mason admitting the same about Theo and the Anuk-ite in the tunnels, and then Liam is snarling, a slight note of _pleading_ in his voice: “Nolan, _go!_ ”

And he’s right, and there’s nothing that Nolan can do about it, so he goes. He scrambles over onto his hands and his knees so that he can propel himself onto his feet, and he _goes,_ sprinting towards the stairs down at the end of the hallway. Behind him, he can hear gunfire and Liam’s fierce snarls, and occasional wounded cries.

He can hear the elevator behind Liam suddenly ping, just as he slams into the stairwell door, and practically trips his way through.

\---

Beacon Hills is a tactical _nightmare._ Theo’s always known this and he’s turned it to his advantage before, but _now…_ He grits his teeth, sat in another—a _different_ —stolen car, and brings the permanent marker he’s holding up to his lips so that he can clamp his teeth down around the lid, and pull it off. He leans over—his eyes flared so he can see in the darkness—and marks the position of the two hunters guarding one of the half-dozen roads out of town on the paper map covering the car’s passenger seat. Once he’s done he flicks his eyes over the rest of the map, all of the areas he’d already scouted marked-off with relevant details.

 _This is the one,_ some quiet, insinuating part of Theo’s mind thinks. If anyone was going to try and break through the blockade that Monroe had erected around the town, it’d be _here._ Only two people, with a limited amount of firepower, and a location that was several _miles_ from anything relevant.

From _backup._

 _You could go,_ that same part of Theo’s mind points out. _You could go right now._

It’d be the easiest thing in the world. He could get out of this car, and shift into his wolf form. It’s dark enough that his coat would blend with the night, and he could rip apart the two hunters before they even realized what was happening. It’d leave the road open, and unguarded. Theo could clean himself up, and get back in his stolen car—his truck left behind, but an acceptable loss—and be hundreds of miles away before anyone even had the _opportunity_ to realize he was gone.

 _You going to leave again?_ Liam had wondered, only a few short hours ago. 

Theo caps the marker, and throws it on top of the map. He starts the car and executes a quick U-turn, heading back into town. The positions of Monroe’s people may have moved, or they may have established new ones. He can check them on his way back to the McCall house.

Except that his phone rings in his pocket.

Theo fishes it out, and frowns. “Scott?”

Scott starts talking, rapid-fire. Theo _hears_ him, but in the background he’s also hearing raised, excited voices chattering away. He hears _Stiles._ He blinks. 

He refocuses, because underneath the edge of adrenaline in Scott’s voice is _pain:_ he’s injured. Something had happened. “Scott,” Theo interrupts, because there’s too much going on and Scott’s speaking so fast that his words are tripping over each other, and getting muddled in Theo’s senses. “ _Scott._ Slow down. What—?”

“You have to get to Liam and the others at the _hospital,_ ” Scott just repeats, and now in addition to the adrenaline and the _pain_ in Scott’s voice, Theo can hear desperation. “Gerard said—”

Theo can feel his blood run cold, because he can _imagine_ what Gerard said. Melissa had called to say that something was going on at the hospital, and probably it even _had;_ the best kinds of traps always used live bait. 

“Just buy us more time,” Scott is saying, even as Theo’s mind is already helpfully unspooling technicolor pictures of Nolan and Mason and Corey and _Liam_ all dead or _dying_ on the hospital’s slick linoleum floors. “Wherever Liam and the others are, get them out of there.”

Theo’s whole _face_ feels like it’s gone numb. “Am I buying you time to come up with a plan or to get help?” He forces himself to ask, because it’s _relevant:_ he should know whether this is a rescue mission or...something else.

“Both,” Scott claims, and hangs up.

It’s actually shockingly easy to infiltrate the hospital, because—like the complete amateurs they _are_ —Monroe’s people are all entirely focused on one singular goal, to the exclusion of all others. Theo would find that fact more comforting, except that their singular goal is _killing Scott’s pack._

Is killing _Liam._

He stands in the middle of the chaos of the first floor, his supernatural hearing shifted all the way as he squints at the ceiling, and tries to decipher what’s happening. Whatever it is, it’s happening on the fourth floor. It’s also happening _directly above Theo._ He’s standing just in front of the elevator and from the sound of it that’s where most of the action is; he can hear voices arguing.

He can hear _Nolan_ arguing.

Theo’s eyes flick towards the stairwell at the far end of the hallway, but draw back towards the elevator. Ordinarily he’d conclude that trapping himself in a metal box whose operation he has no control over would be the _height_ of idiocy, except that he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have _time_ to make it over to the stairs, up four flights of them, and _back_ before whatever is happening on the fourth floor reaches its climax.

And then the elevator _pings_ open in front of Theo, like a divine message. “ _Fuck,_ ” he snarls quietly, and forces his way past the desperate doctors and nurses and patients running _out_ of the elevator so that he can run _in._

He _jams_ his finger against the fourth floor button, over and over again.

“C’mon. _C’mon,_ ” he mutters, his eyes on the ceiling. 

He’s between the third and fourth floors when the gunfire starts. He stops _breathing._ _You’re going to be too late,_ an insidious voice in Theo’s mind whispers, and he shoves it aside because he _has_ to. 

The doors open. Bullets _whiz_ by and slam into the far elevator wall, missing Theo by inches _._ But he doesn’t care, because standing in front of the now-open elevator with his feet planted like an absolute _idiot_ is Liam, and Theo’s lunged forward and grabbed him, and _hauled_ him backwards into and then to the side of the elevator before he’s fully registered his decision to move. 

The doors slide back shut. Theo slaps out one hand to hit the emergency stop button to prevent the hunters outside from forcing them back open. His other hand is still anchored around Liam’s far bicep, Liam’s back still pressed to his chest. There’s something warm and wet bleeding into Theo’s shirt where Liam’s ribs are digging into Theo’s own; he’d been shot.

It doesn’t stop him from shoving away from Theo in the next second, though. He staggers a little as he does and then whips around, his expression vacillating between disbelief and fury and what looks like it could even be _relief,_ Liam huffing out these short, shallow breaths that cause his shoulders to rise and fall unevenly, Liam half-hunched over one of his injured sides. He _stares_ at Theo.

“What are you _doing_ here?” He demands, his words hitching as the effort of speaking apparently jars his still-healing ribs.

Less than an hour ago Theo was sitting in his stolen car and staring at a golden opportunity to _leave_ Beacon Hills, and all its complications, and threats, behind. Outside the elevator, there are a half-dozen fear-poisoned hunters angrily trying to figure out how to get the doors back open. Theo’s clothes are wet now with Liam’s blood. 

Liam is _looking_ at him.

“I was just asking myself the same thing,” Theo tells him, and _means it._

One of the hunters _slams_ their hand against the closed elevator doors in frustration. Liam _jumps,_ his eyes darting to stare at the closed seam of the doors. When he turns his head Theo can really _see_ for the first time the dried, flaking blood coating the side of his head. From the pattern, something had ripped open the skin right over Liam’s left temple. It’s healed now, of course, and Liam doesn’t even seem _aware_ of it any longer, but the fact remains that—if Theo’s guess is correct, and they usually are—someone very nearly managed to put a bullet between Liam’s eyes.

“Look,” Theo snarls, because the sight of _that_ blood, of _that_ injury on Liam’s face is doing something complicated to his chest, and it _needs to be said._ “I am _not_ dying for you.”

Liam’s attention jerks back to him. His eyes narrow, and the line of his mouth tightens. “I’m not dying for you _either,_ ” he spits back, no hesitation.

Theo can feel his jaw clench. In the absolutely _eye-searing_ brightness of the elevator lights, he can see Liam’s do the same. They’re stuck in the middle of a metal box, surrounded by people who intend to see not only them but their entire species eradicated, and dying _for_ each other may be something they both refuse to do, but unless they figure something else out, _dying_ is probably _exactly_ what they’re going to do.

 _You could have left,_ Theo thinks again. 

He could have left Liam to face all this alone.

Something twists in his chest—constricting his sister’s heart—at the thought, but he doesn’t get the chance to dwell on it. Liam suddenly sucks in, and then huffs out, a rough, frustrated breath. He works his jaw, and looks at Theo, his eyes bright and intent in the elevator lights. Theo finds himself holding his breath.

“But I will,” Liam declares, and as begrudging as he sounds, he _is_ declaring it, “fight with you.”

The breath that Theo had been holding shudders loose of his chest without his permission. Part of him wants to look away from Liam but he _can’t;_ he’s caught, held, by Liam’s eyes locked with his. Theo can still see the blood coating one-half of Liam’s face out of his peripheral vision, and he has a brief, _overwhelming_ image of what might have happened if he’d _been there_ when whoever it was had shot at Liam. How it might have been different. 

How it might never have happened at all.

“Okay,” Theo finds himself agreeing. 

His eyes are still locked with Liam’s. He tips his head towards the doors—and the hunters outside—without breaking their gazes; an invitation. A _pact._

“Let’s fight.”

\--- 

Nolan has no idea where he’s supposed to go, or what he’s supposed to do. He starts running down the stairs because that at least seems like it’s _away_ from Monroe’s people—from _Richmond,_ under orders from Monroe not to hurt Nolan because she’d made a deal with _Gabe_ —but halfway down the steps between the second and third floors, he has to grind to a halt and then quickly backpedal, because the door below slams open and spills out even _more_ hunters into the stairwell. Nolan swears and scrambles his way back up the steps, and bursts through the door onto the third floor.

He takes off down the hallway, his head twisted around to stare at the door to see if any of the hunters had followed him. It means he’s not looking where he’s going, and the next instant he slams into someone and stumbles backwards.

But not _far,_ because that someone snaps out their hands and grips his shoulders. “You’re Nolan,” Scott’s mom— _Ms. McCall_ —says, her eyes running over his face. “Scott said you were with Liam.”

“I-I was,” Nolan stammers. “But he told me to—” His eyes flick upwards.

Ms. McCall’s flick up to follow his. Her jaw clenches. She drops her hands. “Okay,” she says, firm and forceful and sounding _exactly_ like her son, or maybe the other way around. Ms. McCall meets his eyes. “Okay, you have a choice.”

Nolan can feel his brow furrow, his expression spasm. Ms. McCall reaches behind herself and unhooks something from the back of her pants, and when she brings it back forward, she _snaps_ it downwards so that the telescoping baton—because that’s what it _is_ —lengthens and locks. It also _crackles_ with electricity. Nolan’s wide eyes jerk back up to Ms. McCall’s.

“You can either keep running,” Ms. McCall tells him, “or you can help me take back this hospital.”

Nolan _stares_ at her. Then, splitting the already-chaotic background noise of the hospital as doctors and nurses and patients yell, and try to to flee: gunfire. Nolan’s head snaps back upwards and his eyes fix once more on the ceiling, where one floor above Liam had made Nolan leave him to fight the hunters alone.

Nolan looks back down at Ms. McCall. “Just tell me what to do.”

Ms. McCall leads him back into the stairwell. It’s empty of hunters now but Nolan doesn’t find that comforting: he gets the feeling that means they’re all up on the fourth floor with _Liam._ “C’mon,” Ms. McCall murmurs, and starts up the steps.

She stops at the doorway onto the fourth floor, and crouches down so that she’s below the little glass window set midway up. Nolan can see her eyes close as she concentrates, her head tilting. He does the same, though he has no idea exactly what it is he’s supposed to be listening for, and then his eyes pop right back open because he hears—

Because he hears _two_ roaring, lupine voices, separate and distinct from each other.

“That’s our cue,” Ms. McCall declares, and surges to her feet to shove through the doorway. Nolan makes a startled noise and hurries after her.

Almost immediately he understands her logic. There are a half-dozen hunters in the hallway that they spill out onto, but they’re all focused _elsewhere._

They’re focused on Liam and—and _Theo,_ the two of them not just fighting but fighting _together,_ and seemingly in perfect synchronization. Nolan slows to a stop, helplessly fascinated, as he watches Theo knock one of the hunters out cold and then immediately bow low at the waist so that Liam—rushing up behind him—can execute some kind of roll over Theo’s offered back, and use the added momentum to just _drop_ a second hunter with a brutally hard, downward-arching kick. 

But even then neither of them slow: Liam engages the next hunter and Theo follows, the two of them dispatching another pair of hunters right before Liam slides into place behind a third, and the _final_ hunter in the hallway, just in time for Theo to crash into the man with a shoulder like a _ram,_ and send him flying back over Liam and onto the floor. 

The hunter doesn’t get up again.

But one of the one of the hunters that Liam and Theo had already dealt with _does:_ they start to rise up, their hands—shaking, but still determined—reaching for their weapon. But Ms. McCall suddenly lunges forward and _jams_ her stun baton into the base of the hunter’s neck, and the hunter goes down again. 

The crackle of electricity draws Theo’s and Liam’s attention, but Nolan barely notices: another of the hunters had started to rise, and Nolan scrambles forward to wrench the man’s gun away from him, and then _slam_ the butt of it against the hunter’s face. Nolan stumbles backwards afterwards, and looks up.

Theo and Liam are already looking back at him, both of them golden-eyed and fang-mouthed and standing close enough together that they’re sharing air. _Oh,_ Nolan thinks, looking at them. _Oh, they_ do _know._

And then his eyes widen, and he yells, “Get down!”

Nolan sees Theo’s and Liam’s heads both whip around even as he’s dropping to his own knees. He sees Theo reach for Liam, and get a fistful of Liam’s shirt as he drags him back, and forcibly turns him as they start to run, Theo’s body half-covering Liam’s as the newly-arrived hunter behind them starts to open fire.

Liam cries out, and goes down hard. Theo follows not long after, the both of them crashing to the floor; Nolan can see the blood soaking into Liam’s right lower pant leg, can see the same spreading out across the sleeve covering Theo’s left arm. _No, no, no,_ he thinks, because both of them had fallen _right_ out into the open, the two of them laying like _sitting ducks_ in the middle of the hallway. Nolan looks desperately back up, can’t help it, just in time to see the hunter down the hallway _smirk,_ and raise their rifle for a second burst of fire.

“No!” Someone suddenly shouts, and shoves them away. “You fire now you could hit—”

 _Me,_ Nolan thinks, and stares at Gabe as Gabe twists around to stare at him.

The other hunter just snarls, and shoves Gabe back. “He made his choice!” They yell.

Gabe opens his mouth to respond but he doesn’t get the chance: while both of them had been distracted, Liam had rolled over onto his stomach—ignoring Theo yelling, “Liam, no!”—and _surged_ to his feet. He crashes into both Gabe and the other hunter, and throws the latter hard enough sideways that they crash into a wall and slump down to the floor. 

They don’t get up.

Gabe, though, takes one look at Liam and his expression _twists_ with hatred. “ _You,_ ” he hisses, his hands already fumbling for his rifle. 

But Liam reaches for the same, and they end up wrestling for it. Nolan stares, horrified and with his breath caught painfully in his chest, because it occurs to him that one of them is going to have to win their confrontation, and when they do…

But then he’s distracted by the sudden _blare_ of radio feedback, before a voice frantically yells, “I can’t get a shot. What do you want me to do?”

And then Nolan’s _blood_ feels like it freezes in his veins, right along with his breath still frozen in his chest, because Monroe—because _Monroe_ —orders, “Just shoot him! Shoot _both_ of them!”

Nolan looks frantically around. Theo is still collapsed on the ground, a pool of blood slowly spreading from his arm, and Liam is still struggling with Gabe. He catches Ms. McCall’s eyes mostly by accident. “Around the corner,” she hisses. “They’re around the corner!”

Nolan’s scrambled to his feet before she’s done speaking. He _sprints_ down the hallway, one hand snapping out to catch the corner of the wall to slingshot himself around so that he can keep running just as fast down the other hallway. He does it a second time to round the _next_ corner, and spots the hunter with the radio at the other end, their gun just starting to come up to point towards—towards Gabe and Liam, still fighting over Gabe’s gun.

Nolan glances desperately around. There’s a fire extinguisher lying on its side; it must have fallen from its usual perch in all the chaos. He rushes forward and grabs it, and _keeps_ rushing forward as he comes up behind the hunter, and raises the extinguisher to _slam_ it down against the back of the hunter’s head. He looks up at the hunter falls.

He looks up just in time to see the three bloody bullet holes marking Gabe’s chest, just seconds before Gabe—his expression more _stunned_ than pained—hits his knees, and collapses onto his front.

“Gabe!” Nolan yells, the fire extinguisher dropping from his nerveless fingers as he practically _throws_ himself forward.

“Nolan, wait!” Liam orders, and tries to catch him. _Does_ catch him, but then almost immediately has to let him go as his whole _body_ suddenly heaves, Liam choking out a harsh sound and then retching. Nolan wants to ask what’s wrong, he _does,_ but.

But he’s already on his knees at Gabe’s side, and helping Gabe turn over onto his back. Somewhere behind him he can hear Theo demand, “Liam? Liam! What is it?” and Liam reply, “The Anuk-ite. I think the Anuk-ite is dead,” but it’s all background noise. It all sounds like it’s coming from very far away.

The tiny, pained sounds that Gabe is making: those sound close. Those sound _thunderously_ loud in Nolan’s ears.

“It’s okay,” Nolan tries to tell him, even though the front of Gabe’s shirt is entirely soaked with blood, and there’s more of it spilling down his chin every time he takes a breath and ends up gasping it back out. “It’s okay, it’ll be okay,” he says, because they’re in a _hospital,_ and the fight’s _over_ now, and—

But Ms. McCall shakes her head slightly, _slowly,_ when Nolan twists around to look back at her from where she’s now standing at Liam’s side. Nolan feels something _give way_ in his chest and _he_ shakes his head, fast and desperate, and looks back down at Gabe. 

“No, no, no,” Nolan pleads, even as the stairwell door is slamming back open, and Liam is calling, “Mason? Corey?” in a tone of absolute bafflement.

“I’m sorry,” Gabe mumbles, the words coming out jagged and wet-sounding. More blood bubbles over his lips. “I’m sorry. I’m _sorry._ ”

“No,” Nolan just repeats, because _no._ He glances desperately back up at Liam, who’d _also_ been shot earlier. But Liam’s standing just fine on that leg, and Gabe is—

Gabe is.

Nolan sees color out of the corner of his eye, and jumps. When he looks over it’s to see Theo crouching down next to him. Theo looks at him—he has to look _away_ from Gabe to do it—and his expression isn’t one that Nolan’s seen on his face before. Granted Nolan’s only known him for a few short days, but the fit of it still seems unpracticed somehow. Raw, like it’s not one that Theo’s used to _wearing_. 

Theo swallows, and reaches across Nolan for one of Gabe’s arms, lying limp on his bloody chest. 

Gabe makes a horrible noise as Theo shifts him, and Nolan starts to lunge forward, intending to do—do _something._ But he can’t, because Liam catches him with an arm looped around his neck, and holds him back. Nolan starts to struggle, instinctual and _useless,_ his mouth already opening to protest, “Don’t—!”

But Theo’s not doing—whatever Nolan might have thought he’d do. Instead his fingers around Gabe’s arm are gentle, and as Nolan watches—surprise replacing some of his grief, and desperation—black veins start to flow from Gabe’s arm, and into Theo’s. _I’ve seen that before,_ Nolan realizes blankly; Liam had done the same thing to Mason back at the animal clinic, after Mason had been shot.

Shot by _Gabe,_ whose shaking and jerking and pained, desperate gasps start to slow, and ease, until he’s lying limp against the hospital floor. His eyelids dip, and struggle back up; he rolls his head sideways to look at Theo.

But before he can say anything—or before _anyone_ can—Theo abruptly stands, and takes a few steps back. His hands are wet with blood that could be Gabe’s or could be the hunters or could be _Liam’s._ That could be all of theirs. He looks at Nolan, and then looks away.

Gabe suddenly gasps. Nolan lunges forward and Liam doesn’t try to stop him this time, his arm immediately unwinding from around Nolan’s neck. Nolan gets both hands around Gabe’s face—forcing himself to ignore the way he can register _wet_ against his fingertips, and what he knows that wetness to be—and holds his eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” Gabe manages, and Nolan knows it’s going to be the last time because Gabe can barely get the words out. His fingers tighten on Gabe’s face, almost _exactly_ like Gabe’s had tightened on his a few days ago. Nolan’s won’t get the chance to leave bruises, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.

 _It’s okay,_ Nolan wants to tell him, except that it isn’t. Instead he says, “Me too,” in a half-broken whisper, because he is.

Gabe’s eyelashes start to flutter, and then close. His head rolls upwards as he stutters out a shaky breath, and he doesn’t draw in a replacement. 

Nolan feels his own breath rush free of his chest. The only reason he doesn’t slump over onto Gabe’s body—his _body_ —is because Liam snaps a hand forward, and catches a fistful of his shirt. He’s not overly gentle in yanking Nolan back upright; Nolan ends up half-collapsed in the opposite direction, against Liam’s knees.

“I”m sorry,” Liam tells him quietly, his fingers spasming around Nolan’s shirt, against his shoulder, and Nolan knows he doesn’t mean for the rough treatment.

 _Me too,_ Nolan thinks again, and closes his eyes, very tightly.

\--- 

Theo comes out of the upstairs bathroom in the McCall house still toweling his hair dry, and it’s reflex— _instinct_ —that has him glancing sideways as he passes by the main bedroom. _Ms. McCall’s_ room, where she and Argent are talking in low voices. Argent looks up as Theo looks over, and their eyes meet. 

Theo drops his, and fast. 

Downstairs on the main floor Corey and Mason are passed out, together, on the couch. There’s a still-bagged air mattress propped against the coffee table that they’d clearly been at least _considering_ setting up, before they’d either given up on the idea or had just sat down and—not gotten back up. Theo’s willing to bet it’s the latter, actually: from the awkward angle of the way Mason’s laying against Corey’s chest, they’d been sitting up against the couch back at one point before tipping over to be more horizontal. 

Scott and Malia are in the kitchen, just a few short feet away from the door down into the basement. Theo slows as he approaches it, his grip going a little white-knuckled around the towel as he unintentionally twists it between his hands. But Scott just looks up from the half-eaten jar of salsa he and Malia are trading off dipping broken shards of tortilla chips into, and squints in what’s clearly _exhaustion,_ not suspicion. 

Also maybe a little lingering _pain:_ Scott had clawed his own eyes out just a few short hours ago, after all.

“You need anything?” Scott asks. “Any of you?” He clarifies, tilting his chin downwards to seemingly indicate the basement.

Theo knows why he’s asking; he can hear the same things Scott undoubtedly is. Still: “Don’t think so,” Theo answers quietly, because for all Scott’s best intentions Theo really _doesn’t_ think there’s anything he can do. 

Scott hesitates for a moment and then nods, accepting that; unspoken as it was. He turns back to his chips, and salsa, and _Malia,_ so Theo takes the opportunity to move for the basement door, and slide through it. He closes it quietly after himself, and then starts down the stairs.

Neither Liam nor Nolan are in the main room, which Theo had known even before he’d set foot in the basement. He loops his towel around his neck, and picks his way past laundry baskets half-full of clothes and random boxes left here or there until he can make his way over to the basement’s bathroom, and lean his shoulder against the doorway. Liam looks up at him as he does.

Nolan does _not._ He retches again, huddled over the toilet and with one forearm braced across the porcelain rim and his forehead braced against _that_ as his whole body heaves. Sat next to him on the ground, Liam tightens his fingers a little further around Nolan’s bare ankle, the leg of his borrowed sweatpants pushed up to make room. Theo can _just_ spot the thin black veins snaking out of Nolan’s calf and into Liam’s hand, but even still: as steadily as Liam is siphoning Nolan’s nausea, it clearly isn’t stopping Nolan’s rolling bouts of sickness.

“Scott said that Deaton thinks it’s the Anuk-ite’s influence,” Liam explains, shooting Nolan an unreadable look. “That it’s literally a little like _withdrawal_ for those who—”

He cuts himself off, grimacing, but Theo doesn’t need him to finish. _That it’s literally a little like withdrawal for those who’d given in to it,_ that’s what he’d been about to say. Nolan dry-heaves again, and ends up spitting up barely more than a mouthful of bile because by this point there’s apparently nothing left in his stomach for him to _lose._

Deaton’s probably right—almost _definitely_ right, he’s _Deaton_ —but at least in Nolan’s case, Theo doesn’t think that’s all it is. Before they’d left the hospital Ms. McCall had covered Gabe’s body, the Sheriff and Agent McCall just a few feet away already talking strategy for how they’d cover up the rest of it, and the whole time Nolan’s face had been about the same color as the sheet Ms. McCall had used. When he’d followed them out of the building, and back to Theo’s stolen car—Liam giving Theo the _driest_ of looks, which Theo had returned—it hadn’t necessarily been because he’d wanted to, but because he clearly didn’t have the presence of mind to protest.

He’d cleaned off Gabe’s blood from his hands, at least. Scott had been ruthlessly, _gently_ adamant about that when they’d gotten back to the McCall house, the fact that his own eyes and cheeks were still smeared with blood from his encounter with the Anuk-ite notwithstanding. 

Theo swallows a sigh, and tilts his chin at Liam. “Get up,” he murmurs. “I’ll take over.”

“No,” Nolan protests shakily, before Liam can respond either way. He starts pushing himself up with one hand braced on the ground, and the other on the cabinet housing the sink. Both tremble. “No, I’m fine. I’m _fine._ ”

Liam makes an incredulous face that Nolan luckily doesn’t see, because he’s too busy trying not to fall over. Theo bites back a frustrated noise. “Nolan,” he says. “There’s no point lying to—” he hesitates, just a split-second of hesitation as his eyes flick to Liam’s before he finishes, “—us, remember?”

“I’m _fine,_ just let me _—_ ” Nolan just insists stubbornly, and forces himself the rest of the way to his feet. Theo reaches out to steady him as Nolan staggers backwards a step. “I’m _fine._ ”

“Clearly,” Liam mutters under his breath, but—after sharing a look with Theo—he lets Nolan go.

Theo stays in the doorway as Nolan rinses out his mouth, and brushes his teeth—his toothbrush still left on the counter from the other night—but doesn’t say a word. He keeps both hands around either end of his towel, his attention on Nolan and whether he’s going to stumble again; whether he’s going to have to _catch_ him again. Nolan _knows_ he’s watching, his shoulders ratcheting up around his ears, but he doesn’t say anything either, just finishes brushing his teeth and then pushes past Theo in the doorway. 

Theo steps back to make room, but not _that_ much. He twists his head around on his neck, his shoulders still pressed to the door jamb, to watch as Nolan picks his unsteady way over to the futon mattress that Liam had already pulled onto the floor in deference to the fact that they were going to have to try to fit three people on it. When he turns back around, Liam is watching him.

He’s also still sitting on the floor. Theo raises his eyebrows. Liam’s lips quirk, and he looks away.

But not for long. His gaze is shrewd when he looks back. “Quite the rescue mission you executed.”

Something flutters in Theo’s chest, but he ignores it. “Is this you thanking me for saving your life?” He pauses, significantly, and then adds, “ _Again._ ”

Liam snorts. He doesn’t shake his head in denial. He doesn’t nod in agreement. 

He doesn’t look away from Theo.

“You could have left, couldn’t you?” He says. “Earlier, when Scott had you—doing whatever he had you doing.”

Theo just looks back at him, though he can’t stop his jaw from clenching.

“Yeah,” Liam agrees, like Theo had admitted it. “That’s what I figured that meant. What you said in the elevator,” he clarifies, apparently seeing Theo’s brow furrow. “ _I was just asking myself the same thing,_ ” he recites, his voice gone a little—benignly, not maliciously—mocking. 

Theo drops his gaze from Liam, has to. He touches his tongue to his bottom lip. “Scott had me scouting the locations of Monroe’s people. Just in case.” He looks back up at Liam in time to see something pinched spasm across Liam’s face; imagining that _just in case_ scenario, maybe. “One of the roads leading out of town only had two hunters guarding it, and minimal chance of backup.”

He doesn't say _I considered it,_ though he had. He doesn't need to: Liam knows.

That’s why Liam tilts his head, his eyes roving over Theo’s face. “So why didn’t you take advantage?”

Theo looks at him. Liam had showered but he’d done a half-assed job of it, barely more than a quick in-and-out to get the worst of the blood and other crap off, and it shows in the fact that there’s still just the _slightest_ clump of reddish-brown marking his hairline, right by his temple. Theo hesitates, torn between conflicting urges—conflicting _instincts_ —and then he shoves off the door jamb using his shoulders, and picks his way over until he can crouch between Liam’s spread knees, Liam’s feet braced out wide and planted flat on the floor. Liam watches him curiously. He doesn’t move or protest, though his eyes go a little hooded. 

Theo reaches forward, and presses two fingers to that clump of blood marking Liam’s hairline, and then _drags_ them forward, until they’re notched against Liam’s temple, where he can feel Liam’s pulse beating against his fingertips. Theo stares at the place where he’s touching Liam—one of the first times he’s ever done it outside of a life-or-death conflict, he realizes; without a violent excuse—and then he flicks his eyes over, to Liam’s.

He asks, “How close did this come to ending up between your eyes?”

Liam doesn’t answer, though his chin tips up. A little defiant, a little like a _dare._ The movement doesn’t dislodge Theo’s fingertips from his temple and Liam doesn’t make any move to make them. 

Theo’s fingers spasm against Liam’s skin, and then he surges forward, and presses his mouth to Liam’s own. 

Liam doesn’t startle, though he does _moan._ His legs widen a little further to give Theo the room he needs to wedge himself in even closer, Theo’s fingers sliding back from Liam’s temple to his hair to hold his head steady as Theo licks across the seal of Liam’s lips, which are already dropping open for him. One of Liam’s hands comes up, and _twists_ in Theo’s shirt, pulling him in even harder.

Theo pulls back, after a while. He drops his forehead against Liam’s own as he pants a little against Liam’s mouth.

“I guess,” he tells him, sitting back just enough that he can meet Liam’s eyes, “we’re going to find out whether you’ll fight for me after all.”

Liam searches his face for a long few seconds.

He says, “I guess we will.”

\--- 

Nolan’s not exactly _asleep_ when Liam and Theo finally come out of the bathroom, but he is—drifting, he guesses. He’d been staring at the far wall from where he’d curled up on his side on the futon mattress, his eyes feeling gritty and dry because he keeps forgetting to blink. Still, he _does_ blink and twist slightly around to look up at Liam and Theo when their shadows fall over him, the two of them backlit by the moonlight spilling in through one of the McCall house’s basement windows, set high up on the wall. Neither of them are bearing any _hint_ of the shift, and probably it’s just exhaustion or continued shock or whatever, but even without their glowing eyes or fang-filled mouths, in that light they still look strange, otherworldly; Nolan has to curl his fingers in against his arms, banded tight across his chest, because his impulse control is shot and he’s suddenly _desperate_ to reach out and touch. 

He also realizes that he’s laying on the exact middle of the futon mattress, splitting it in half and therefore forcing the otherwise _solid_ pair of Liam-and-Theo to split in half to match. “Oh,” he mumbles, and starts trying to scramble upright. “Oh, no, sorry, wait—”

But Liam just puts a hand on his shoulder, and encourages him back down. On his other side, Theo already has one knee down on the mattress, and is twisting smoothly around to put his back to it. Liam says, “It’s fine. It’s _fine,_ ” insistently because Nolan is still jittering around, cotton-brained and uneasy, and then he starts to lay down, too.

It leaves Nolan half-sitting up between the two of them, and that seems—weird, somehow. Against the natural order of things. Nolan collapses back down, gracelessly and probably too fast. 

He can see Theo and Liam looking at each other over the width of his chest, though neither says anything.

At least not until Liam murmurs, “Just go to sleep, Nolan,” an exhausted order. _That’s what_ you _kept ordering me to do,_ Nolan thinks at Theo, but it makes sense, doesn’t it: Liam and Theo sharing _this_ responsibility like they end up seeming to share everything else, including their burdens. Liam pulling Theo out of the holding cell at the sheriff’s station. Theo stopping Liam from doing something he’d regret with Gabe. The two of them saving _each other_ at the hospital.

 _What I am even doing here_ , Nolan wonders, his eyes drifting to the ceiling. Lying limp on his chest his hands spasm around nothing. They’re clean of blood now but just a few short hours ago they’d been stained with it, Gabe’s face between his hands and Gabe apologizing in fits and wet-sounding starts. He’d done it only _after_ the Anuk-ite had been killed—Liam leaned over retching, because _he’d_ given in to the Anuk-ite’s influence for at least a little while, too—but Nolan’s telling himself that that part doesn’t matter: Gabe had been sorry and that’s the part that Nolan’s going to hold on to, because now Gabe is dead.

He squeezes his eyes shut.

He startles awake some time later from a dream he doesn’t remember, but that leaves him sweating and ill-feeling regardless. He’s breathing too fast, he realizes immediately, almost hyperventilating, and it’s making the edges of his vision go spotty as he stares fixedly, _helplessly,_ up at the night-dark ceiling.

It makes _Liam_ go spotty when Liam whips out a hand, and gets a hold of Nolan’s face to turn it around, towards him. “Hey,” he orders, firm for all that he’s saying it in a half-whisper. “ _Hey._ Nolan, you have to _breathe._ ”

But Nolan _is_ breathing. He can’t comply with Liam’s order, much as he wants to, because he already _is_ breathing; that’s not the problem. The problem is every single one of his breaths is too short, too shallow, and he can’t get his lungs to work any deeper. Every time he tries it feels like they butt up against the cage of his ribs, shrunken too small to hold all his organs and the yawning _void_ he can feel opening up between all of them, _what do I do now, what do I do now, what do I—_

“ _Nolan,_ ” Liam insists, and Nolan feels his expression screw up.

“I’m sorry,” Nolan gasps out, because he _is._ Sorry that he can’t breathe the way that Liam wants him to, sorry that he didn’t stop that hunter at the hospital fast enough before he could shoot Gabe, sorry that he and Gabe had ever made the decisions they did that’d led them to being in that hallway in the _first_ place…

“I’m _sorry,_ ” he tells Liam, trying to get him to _understand,_ his eyes running over Liam’s jaw and cheekbones and nose; all the places that Nolan had made him _bleed_ that one day in that classroom. Nolan’s throat is still sore from his earlier bout of sickness and some part of him wonders how much of that version of himself he managed to rid himself of; how much still remains, even after the Anuk-ite. “I’m sorry, I’m _sor—_ ”

“ _Stop,_ ” Liam orders, louder this time. “Stop. Stop _apologizing,_ just—”

But Nolan can’t, his eyes slipping closed as his vision starts to _tunnel,_ because he still can’t get enough air but the air he _can_ get is going towards _begging_ Liam to understand that he’s _sorry_ —

But then he freezes, his eyes snapping open. Liam’s mouth against his is very warm, his lips chapped—which seems weird, some corner of Nolan’s mind manages to think, because wouldn’t his healing erase that?—and Nolan can feel Liam’s breath skating across his cheeks when Liam huffs out an exhale, low and rough and through his nose. Liam breathes in one more time against Nolan’s mouth—Nolan breathing in at the same time in immediate, reflexive reaction—and then out.

He pulls back. “I know,” he tells Nolan, staring straight into his eyes. “I know you are.”

And then his eyes flick _past_ Nolan, over his shoulder. To _Theo,_ Nolan realizes.

“I know,” he repeats. Nolan can feel the mattress below the three of them shift as Theo stiffens; as _Theo’s_ breath freezes in his chest, based on the sharp inhale of it that Nolan can feel against the back of his neck.

And then Liam looks back at Nolan. Nolan had felt his expression go slack with surprise when Liam had kissed him but now it tightens _right_ back up, and Liam’s does the same the next instant like an echo. _I’m sorry,_ Nolan thinks helplessly, and like he can _hear_ it,like he can _sense_ it, Liam suddenly surges forward and takes his mouth again, like he could smother the words before they could make it out into the open air, where Liam doesn’t want to hear them. 

Nolan gasps and shivers and feels Liam’s lips move against his, but that’s not all he feels: there’s a heavy weight resting against his collarbone that he realizes is Liam’s arm, and when he breaks away from Liam’s mouth to look, he sees that Liam had darted a hand forward to capture a handful of Theo’s hair, his fingers white-knuckled around the strands and Theo’s eyes closed, his mouth dropped open with his head tilted into Liam’s grip. Liam groans against the edge of Nolan’s jaw, and when he opens his mouth around the edge of it—his fingers spasming around Theo’s hair, and causing Theo to loose a quiet, almost _soundless_ moan—Nolan feels the very tips of Liam’s _fangs_ pressing against his skin.

He sucks in a harsh, startled breath _._

“ _Liam,_ ” Theo warns, though it comes out breathy and jagged.

“I can’t,” Liam gasps out. “I—” Nolan feels the brush of Liam’s closed eyelids as Liam ducks his head down, his forehead pressing _hard_ against Nolan’s cheekbone.

“It’s the adrenaline,” Theo tells him, still rough-edged and shaky. “It’s—”

 _Everything that’s happened the last few days,_ Nolan thinks. It’s that they all almost died, multiple times and in multiple ways, and that they almost had to watch— _did_ have to watch, Nolan corrects, his expression crumpling—people that they cared about die. When Liam tilts his head back up, his mouth slack and open and panting, his eyes are shining gold and hooded. The tips of his fangs gleam in the moonlight against the dark of his mouth beyond.

Liam’s trying to control it, Nolan can tell. He can feel Liam’s chest expanding and retracting against his own as Liam gasps in air, sharp and shallow and through his nose, for all that his mouth is still open. And his _mouth._ Nolan can see Liam’s lips move as he whispers something; soundless and wordless but over and over again. His eyes squeeze shut. 

His _golden_ eyes. Nolan reaches forward before he can stop himself. He presses two fingers to the soft skin just below Liam’s right eye. 

Liam’s eyes snap right back open. Behind Nolan, Theo gives another sharp-edged moan as Liam’s arm jerks—Nolan feeling it against his collarbone—and apparently yanks at the handful of Theo’s hair that Liam is still holding. Nolan twists around to look at Theo, can’t help it—his fingers left behind on Liam’s face, still just a gentle press against the fragile skin there—and finds himself searching Theo’s eyes, caught, as Theo looks right back. His head is still tilted into Liam’s grip but as Nolan watches he suddenly ducks it, and presses it against the back of Nolan’s neck with a groan.

Still, he’s not quick enough to prevent Nolan from seeing the look that’d crossed his face, raw and desperate and _cracked open_. Nolan looks back at Liam, wondering if he _saw,_ only to find that Liam is already staring at the place where Theo had hidden his face, _his_ expression screwed up. 

And then he uses the hand he still has in Theo’s hair to drag his head up, and further over Nolan’s shoulder so that Liam can kiss _him,_ their mouths colliding with a clack that Nolan can _hear._

They’re not gentle with each other. The second Liam had started pulling Theo’s head up, Theo had started to _snarl,_ instinctive-seeming and rumbling through _Nolan’s_ chest—Liam’s yanking of Theo closer to _himself_ yanking Theo closer to _Nolan_ , so that Theo is pressed right up against his back—but Liam’s only response had been to tighten his hand in Theo’s hair, to jerk Theo’s head further to the side to deepen the angle of their kiss. As Nolan stares up at them, stunned and barely _breathing,_ he can see one of Liam’s fangs catch on Theo’s bottom lip; there’s a flash of red between them for the barest _instant_ before Theo’s healing kicks in, and wipes it away.

Before Liam’s next dragging, _insistent_ kiss _scrapes_ it away.

When Liam pulls back, his eyes are still golden. Theo’s are, too, but then he—glances down at Nolan, and in the space of a blink, the color disappears. Nolan stares up at him, his mouth suddenly running dry as he remembers their positions being _reversed,_ Nolan staring _down_ at him as Theo looked _up_ , Theo crouched low in that gas station bathroom with that sharp-edged smirk on his face that first day they’d met. _That was less than a week ago,_ Nolan realizes, and feels something _hard_ jam up against the bottom of his throat, shortening his breath.

Theo searches his eyes—Nolan never looking away from him even with the way he can feel his breath starting to come too fast again, _what am I going to do_ —and then he slowly, _slowly_ leans down, until he can press his mouth to Nolan’s. 

Nolan sucks in a sharp gasp, and holds it. He drops his jaw open for Theo’s tongue when Theo presses it against his lips. He shudders, and groans, and closes his eyes, and can’t stop himself from helplessly comparing Theo’s kiss to Liam’s. Liam’s had been fast, hard, a little desperate, but Theo’s is slow, _deliberate._ He scrapes the tip of his tongue over the insides of Nolan’s teeth and then _drags_ it up the underside of Nolan’s own, and Nolan can’t help his hips bucking.

Bucking right into _Liam’s_ hips, pressed hard up against his own from when Liam had dragged Theo closer to himself and consequently pulled all _three_ of them together. Liam _moans._ One of his hands—Nolan _thinks_ it’s one of his, and not Theo’s—lands on Nolan’s hip, and _grips_ as Liam’s hips roll up against his in turn. 

Nolan can feel the prick of claws against the bare skin of his stomach, where his shirt has ridden up. He sucks in another sharp breath.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Liam hisses, his hand flying off of Nolan’s hip and—when Nolan breaks away from Theo’s mouth to check—clutching at his own hair as he rolls over onto his back, panting. He stares up at the ceiling, his eyes _shining_ gold in the dim light, his shirt rumpled and pulled up to reveal a dark trail of hair leading down to the bulge between his legs, still covered by his sweatpants. He looks over at Nolan like he can sense the attention. His mouth is still full of fangs.

His eyes flick up to Theo, still bent low and hovering over Nolan.

“Theo,” he pleads. Nolan looks back up at Theo in time to see him nod, soft and shallowly.

“Yeah, Liam,” Theo answers quietly, like he’d heard and perfectly understood whatever it was that Liam had been silently asking, and then he shifts sideways—sliding smoothly over the top of Nolan, though he leaves one hand behind, resting lightly on Nolan’s chest—so that he can settle on top of Liam, his knees on either side of Liam’s hips. Liam’s hands immediately come up to _clutch_ at his thigh, his shoulder, and Nolan gets it then: he can see Liam’s claws digging into Theo’s skin, the thin material of his sweatpants, but it doesn’t matter. One of Liam’s claws raises a short scratch low on Theo’s collarbone as he pulls Theo down over him, but it only lasts a second.

Theo’s healing erases it.

Their kiss is even rougher this time, Liam leaning up into it and Theo pressing down. When Theo breaks away on a sharp cry—Liam’s hips rolling up against Theo’s, Liam’s hand on Theo’s leg _dragging_ him down into it—Liam just tilts his head sideways and, as far as Nolan can tell, _bites_ at Theo’s neck. Theo’s eyes are hooded when he glances over at Nolan, his mouth open and wet. 

His fingers clutch, and then relax, around Nolan’s shirt.

“Okay,” he suddenly gasps, rearing up some. “Okay, c’mon.” His hand leaves Nolan’s chest so that both it and his other hand can tangle in Liam’s shirt, tugging it up and then _off_ when Liam crunches up to let him. Theo doesn’t waste time: even before Liam’s shoulders hit the futon mattress again, he’s slid down in between Liam’s legs, dragging Liam’s sweatpants and briefs with him as Liam arches his hips to help. 

Nolan’s next breath shudders loose of his chest on a shaky moan.

Liam’s eyes snap over to his. They’re still golden, and shining, and the skin around them crumples as he grimaces. “God, I want,” he grinds out, but his claw-tipped hands stay firmly away from Nolan. They don’t stay away from _Theo,_ though; Theo who leans down without ceremony or fanfare to swallow Liam’s cock to the root in one smooth movement. Liam cries out and arches and clutches one hand in Theo’s hair, the other slapping out to the side. 

He looks back over at Nolan, best he seems to be able to with Theo’s bobbing head and his own slipping heels.

“Come, c’mere,” he manages to gasp out, his head jerking to indicate the same. Nolan hesitates, and then moves slowly forward, until his face is hovering just over Liam’s. Liam stares up at him, still panting in air through his open—and _fanged_ —mouth. “I, I can’t,” Liam admits, frustrated and breathy, and so Nolan leans down, and presses their foreheads together.

Liam immediately arcs up into the touch, the muscles of his neck standing out some with the effort. Nolan brings a hand to his face, the touch meant to be _soothing,_ but his stroking thumb catches on Liam’s open mouth.

It catches on one of Liam’s _fangs,_ the pad of Nolan’s thumb _singing_ a bit with sensation at the rough scrape. Nolan freezes on a sharp breath. 

Liam groans, his whole _body_ shuddering from the place where Nolan’s touching him to the place where _Theo_ is, one of Theo’s hands flattened low on Liam’s stomach to hold him down—hold him steady—for Theo’s working mouth. Nolan can’t help watching.

He can’t help _dragging_ the pad of his thumb along the edge of Liam’s fang as he does.

“Ah, jesus,” Liam gasps not long after, his lips brushing against the side of Nolan’s hand and causing _Nolan_ to shiver. “Theo,” he pants, then: “Theo!”

And this time Nolan gets to _watch_ what last time he’d gotten to experience: Theo sliding his mouth down low, _low,_ on Liam’s cock, his throat working as Liam bucks and moans and _comes._

Theo doesn’t pull away until Liam slumps, boneless, against the futon mattress below them. When he does, Nolan can see these tiny pinprick scratches against his hairline where one of Liam’s claws must have caught; his shoulder where Liam’s other hand had been clutching. They disappear in seconds. Theo’s eyes flick up to his, one wrist rising to wipe across his mouth. Nolan shudders, and looks helplessly down at Liam.

Liam whose eyes are just slitting open. His _human_ eyes; the gold is gone. Nolan stares, and then his attention darts down to Liam’s hands, which are blunt-tipped and lax against the mattress; his own stomach where one had fallen away from Theo’s hair. _Oh,_ Nolan thinks, his eyes dragging up to Theo, and then back to Liam. 

Liam _grins._

He reaches up, _fast_ —supernaturally fast, maybe—and gets a hold of Nolan’s face, and drags it down to his own. He kisses Nolan, and _hard,_ but his fingertips stay blunt and his teeth, when Nolan drags his tongue against them, are the same. Nolan moans, and then _gasps,_ because Liam suddenly sits up. His mouth never leaves Nolan’s own as he does, forcing him up and then tipping him backwards so that Nolan hits his back, and Liam can crawl between his legs and _cover_ Nolan’s body with his own. His hands stroke down, and then back up, the outsides of Nolan’s thighs.

But then one of his hands disappears, and when Nolan slits his eyes open—shivering, because the second he moves to look Liam nudges his mouth up underneath Nolan’s jaw, and starts to _suck_ —to see that Liam’s missing hand had reached back to clutch at Theo’s side, Theo having slotted himself up against Liam’s back in between Nolan’s legs. Theo hooks his chin over Liam’s shoulder, and lets his eyes flare gold as he _smirks._

Nolan sucks in a _sharp_ breath. 

Liam whips around to squint narrow-eyed at Theo. “What’d you just do?” He accuses. Even still, he doesn’t wait for Theo’s answer, just twists back around to study Nolan’s face, his eyes searching.

“It’s the shift,” Theo answers, and when Nolan’s gaze snaps back to him, his smirk _widens._ “He likes it.”

Nolan freezes, caught.

But Liam just reaches back and jams an elbow into Theo’s side, digging in and following Theo when he makes an irritated, protesting noise and tries to move away. “He’s _afraid_ of it, you jackass,” Liam corrects grouchily. 

He’s glaring back at Theo, so he doesn’t see Nolan’s eyes snap to his, or how Nolan’s expression tightens.

“No, I’m not,” Nolan denies, and Liam’s attention drags back to him then. Liam frowns. Nolan feels the look on his face screw up _further._ “I’m _not,_ ” he insists.

Liam just studies him, and then he drops one hand down to _tap_ a finger over—over Nolan’s _heart,_ beating triple-time in his chest. “Yeah,” Liam counters pointedly, and flares his nostrils just to drive it home that much harder, “you are.”

Nolan falters. _There’s no point lying to_ me,Theo had said, and later—earlier tonight—he’d expanded that _me_ to an _us,_ him and Liam exchanging significant looks every time Nolan had tried to claim that he was fine. Still.

_Still._

Theo makes a startled noise and _just_ manages to pivot back out of the way as _Nolan_ surges up this time, and knocks _Liam_ back. It’s surprise. That’s the only explanation for why Nolan gets away with it, Liam toppling over and onto his back, his eyes—his _human_ eyes, though they fleck with gold—going wide. It leaves Nolan sitting astride his hips, _straddling_ him, Nolan’s hands on either side of his head as Nolan glares down at him.

“Even, even if I _am,_ ” Nolan argues, refusing to admit it even if there _is_ no point lying to either Liam below him, or Theo behind him, “that doesn’t mean. That doesn’t make me—!”

 _Weak._ That’s how Nolan almost finishes that sentence, before he swallows it back. _Weak,_ which neither Liam nor Theo had—or would—accuse him of being, but which he _had_ been, because—because that’s how the Anuk-ite—that’s how _Monroe_ —had gotten in, had _influenced_ him. Nolan feels his fierce expression crumple as he brings a hand over to trace his fingers across Liam’s face below him; jaw and cheek and nose.

All the places that Nolan had made him bleed.

“Nolan,” Liam breathes, Nolan feeling it as much as _hearing_ it as Liam exhales it out against Nolan’s fingers still resting against his face.

And then Nolan jumps—Liam below him doing the same—because Theo suddenly appears behind him, slotting himself in slowly, _slowly,_ against Nolan’s back, his thighs knocking into the back of Nolan’s own. Nolan shivers slightly and twists further around to look at him.

“You are afraid,” Theo tells him, but Nolan finds himself holding his breath, not arguing, because he can tell that Theo isn’t done, “and you _do_ like it.” He lifts a hand, and scrapes it back along Nolan’s face, dragging some of his sweat-damp hair away from his forehead. “You want to know why?” He wonders, so close now that he’s practically _whispering_ it into Nolan’s ear.

Nolan hesitates, and then _nods,_ fast and frantic.

The slice of Theo’s expression that he can see out of the corner of his eye goes _sly._ Theo’s hand drops from the side of his face to his chin, _forcing_ his head back onto Theo’s shoulder and a _gasp_ from Nolan’s throat.

But that’s _nothing_ to the jolt of adrenaline—of _fear_ —that he experiences when he feels Theo’s fangs, Theo’s mouth open and pressed wide against his neck. Nolan _freezes,_ even as he feels something low in his gut throb.

Theo holds him there for a long, few, _dragging_ seconds, and then he releases him. He takes his fangs away from Nolan’s neck, and his hand away from Nolan’s head, and he presses his mouth back to Nolan’s ear.

He says, “You like it, because it means that every time you _are_ afraid, and every time you don’t let it stop you, you’ve beaten it. You’ve _won._ ”

Theo pulls back. He smirks again, but it’s close-mouthed, this time. His eyes are hooded. Satisfied, but not at Nolan’s expense. Nolan stares at him, twisted around and with his gaze running over Theo’s face, and then he lets out a harsh, helpless noise and pivots the rest of the way around, until he can take Theo’s face between his hands and kiss _him._ They start to tip backwards and Nolan can feel Theo trying to correct their shared balance—the coiled _strength_ of his muscles shifting under Nolan’s hands, and against his chest, and between Nolan’s thighs—but Nolan _wants that,_ suddenly. 

He pushes forward harder, _deliberately,_ and isn’t surprised in the slightest when Theo gives in without protest, and lets them fall back down onto the mattress, Nolan pinning him. _He’s a spy,_ Gabe had said. _A liar._ Nolan pushes himself up on his palms so he can look down at Theo looking up at him. _Waiting_ for a sign from Nolan, a _signal;_ something he could react to; his next cue. 

_I’ll make it worth your while,_ Theo had promised him that day in the warehouse of Monroe’s building, like someone who’d learned how to do exactly that. Like someone whose _survival_ had depended on learning how to do exactly that. Nolan feels something twist in his chest, and he realizes that if he’s feeling it, then Theo—and probably Liam, too—are _sensing_ it. He gives up on trying to hide it before he even really starts.

He sees something that looks a lot like _surprise_ flicker across Theo’s face. He touches the place where it’d disappeared, right at the edge of Theo’s mouth, and then leans down and puts his own mouth there. 

“Before,” he says, his lips scraping against Theo’s as he does, “you said we were on a clock.” He flicks his eyes up to Theo’s just in time to see the flash of recognition in Theo’s as Theo apparently remembers. Nolan touches his tongue to his bottom lip, which very nearly means he touches it to _Theo’s,_ with how close they still are. “Are we, are we still on a clock?”

Theo hesitates, and then he shakes his head slightly. “No,” he croaks, and then—and then his eyes flick past Nolan to _Liam,_ and he says, loaded like a confession that Nolan doesn’t have the context for, but can recognize: “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

Nolan glances behind himself just in time to watch Liam _shudder_ out an unsteady breath, his eyes never leaving Theo’s. Nolan turns back to Theo, Theo’s gaze dragging up from Liam to Nolan’s.

“Okay,” Nolan agrees, his lips flickering up helplessly into a small smile. He jumps and then smiles _wider_ when he feels the very tips of Liam’s fingers brushing his back, and then Liam’s whole _hand_ molding itself to his spine before sliding around to his hip as Liam presses himself up close. “Okay, good.”

Theo’s still entirely dressed, absurdly enough. He and Nolan both are, for all that Liam is stark naked and apparently completely unconcerned with that fact. Nolan drags his fingers down Theo’s chest, the fabric of the simple t-shirt Theo had thrown on to replace his ruined one stretching beneath Nolan’s fingers, and then when he gets to the edge of it, he twists his fingers around to tangle in its hem. He starts tugging it up.

Theo shifts up to let him.

He falls back down bare-chested to the mattress afterwards, and goes _right back_ to staring up at Nolan, patient and steady and _waiting._ _What else would he let me do,_ Nolan wonders, his fingertips _spasming_ against Theo’s lower stomach at just the thought, and he can see—the muscles of Theo’s abdomen tightening—the way that _Theo’s_ breath hitches as _Nolan_ thinks it, his nostrils flaring. Nolan can’t help it. He reaches up with one hand to touch the very edge of Theo’s nose; the place where he can feel Theo’s short, sharp breaths huffing against his skin.

He stutters in a shaky breath when Theo suddenly drops his jaw open, his mouth beyond full of—full of fangs. 

It’s an invitation. It’s also the second time he’s made it: back at the warehouse the electricity had been up too high for him to shift but he’d still scraped his tongue along the edges of his teeth and promised Nolan that he’d show him his fangs— _what big teeth I have,_ mocking for all that he’d _meant it,_ Nolan understands now—in exchange for Nolan’s help. Nolan hesitates, and then he carefully trails one single fingertip down the curve of Theo’s upper lip, until it bumps past it and into Theo’s open mouth.

Until it lands right on top of one of Theo’s upper fangs.

Theo’s breath hitches just like Nolan’s had but his mouth never moves; he holds his head perfectly still. His hands, though; at some point he’d dragged them up Nolan’s sides to grasp his hips, and _now_ he curls his fingers inward. Nolan gasps and bucks as he feels the _scrape_ and pointed, wicked tips of Theo’s claws dig lightly into his skin, the places where his shirt had ridden up.

“Jesus _christ,_ ” Liam suddenly whispers behind Nolan, causing him to jump. Nolan twists around to look at him purely out of reflex, and then can’t help his shaky, breathy moan when Liam _whines,_ helpless and lupine-sounding and with his eyes—his _golden_ eyes—fixing on Nolan’s own. “Nolan, can I—” he begs, and tugs pointedly at Nolan’s shirt.

Nolan nods, his throat too tight to speak. He realizes only _after_ Liam starts yanking up his shirt—not overly gently—that he’s going to have to take his hand away from Theo’s mouth to do it, but it’s done before he can protest. 

His hand lands back on Theo’s face, two fingers resting lightly over Theo’s open lips. But it’s _Liam_ who says, “God, Theo— _please._ ”

Still, Theo doesn’t move until Nolan—Theo’s gaze sharp, and intent, on his face—gives the tiniest, assenting nod.

The second he does, though, Theo suddenly twists his head just _enough_ that Nolan’s fingers slip into his mouth. They land on his tongue, and Nolan feels a sharp burst of arousal wrench its way up his spine, but it’s _nothing_ to what he feels when Theo closes his teeth around the second knuckles of Nolan’s fingers, the tips of his fangs digging in. Nolan freezes, instinct warring with the hot, squirming thing in his gut, and then shudders and _moans_ when Theo drags his tongue up the pads of Nolan’s captured fingers, and swirls it around, before digging it in between them and skating it _up_. 

But it’s _Liam_ who swears, “Ah, _god,_ ” and drops his forehead against the middle of Nolan’s spine, his breaths huffing out against Nolan’s lower back and his hands—Nolan glancing down best he can with his instincts, his _hind-brain_ still singularly focused on his fingers held fast between Theo’s fangs—to see that Liam’s hands are once more clawed, and pressed flat and _hard_ to Theo’s ribs, on either side of Nolan’s body.

Theo just _laughs,_ low and smooth and with his lips still closed around Nolan’s fingers, even if his eyes are on the middle of Nolan’s chest, like he could see _through_ Nolan to Liam hiding his face behind him. But then he looks up at Nolan—something sly glittering in his eyes—and Nolan slides his fingers carefully free. They still tingle, and _sing,_ because Theo doesn’t release them as Nolan does. 

Nolan shudders, even as Theo is goading, “Having some trouble?” to Liam still hunched down against Nolan’s spine.

“Fuck you,” Liam shoots back, but it comes out breathy; still half that lupine whine.

But it doesn’t stop Nolan’s hips from bucking at the idea—at the _visual_ —that immediately blooms in his mind as Liam says it. 

Both Theo and Liam stiffen below and behind him. “Really?” Liam manages, sounding strangled. Nolan twists around to look at him. He swallows, hesitating, but.

But he remembers seeing them at the hospital, fighting together like they’d been doing it all their lives. He remembers watching them in the front seat of Liam’s car after Theo had stopped Liam from killing Gabe, something speculative in Liam’s eyes as he’d looked over at Theo beside him.

He remembers thinking _oh._

He admits, breathy: “I want to see what it’s like. What it’s _really_ like,” he corrects, thinking of earlier when Liam had been holding Theo’s head between his legs, Liam desperate to control the shift and Theo more than willing to help him, “when you don’t have to hold back.”

Liam’s eyelids flutter shut on a high, helpless moan. His fingers still on Theo’s stomach spasm, raising thin welts on Theo’s skin that causes _Theo_ —his hips bucking up against Nolan’s—to groan. 

“God, okay,” Liam scrapes out, and then he hooks his chin over Nolan’s shoulder as he stares down at Theo and repeats, a question this time: “Okay?”

Theo’s eyes snap to his. He nods. “Yeah, yes,” he breathes. He doesn't say _please_ but he doesn’t have to: it’s there hanging in the air between all of them regardless.

“Okay,” Liam mumbles, clearly to himself this time. “Okay, okay—” he continues, pulling back from Nolan.

Nolan’s confused until he isn’t. He’s confused until Theo directs, “My wallet,” and then he sucks in a sharp breath as he realizes what— _to_ what—Theo is directing Liam. His gaze jerks downwards to lock with Theo’s, Theo’s mouth going curved and sly and _satisfied_ as he looks back up at Nolan.

Then: “C’mere,” he orders, tugging lightly at Nolan’s hips to encourage him further up Theo’s chest. Nolan frowns, not understanding the point, but shuffles up regardless, until his knees are just underneath Theo’s armpits. He’s about to ask when he abruptly gets it.

He’s about to ask when Theo drops a hand over the covered bulge of Nolan’s cock, the heel of his palm _stroking_ up the hard line of it and causing Nolan’s eyes to roll up in his head. “Take these,” Theo requests, plucking at Nolan’s sweats, “off?”

Nolan stares down at him for a second, and then nods fast and hard and shifts to the side so that he can roll over onto his back, and start working his borrowed sweats and briefs down his legs. It’s why he sees that Liam is doing the same to Theo, Theo lifting his hips to help on a breathy moan.

It’s why he sees the little packet that Liam must have retrieved from Theo’s wallet, resting innocuously on the mattress by Theo’s hip. 

“Oh,” Nolan gasps, staring at it and with all _sorts_ of images starting to unspool in his head, made more vivid and technicolor by the way that Theo slides one heel up and to the side, spreading his legs for Liam, who takes immediate advantage to slot himself inside the offered space and _bite_ at the edge of Theo’s raised knee. 

And honestly, he’s willing to stay _right there_ and watch—Liam’s fingers starting to fumble the lube packet open—but Theo reaches out, and gets a hand on his hip. Nolan startles and looks over.

Theo’s eyes are hooded, his mouth dropped open and wet—his whole body _jerking_ at the first press of Liam’s slicked fingers between his legs—but still he manages to beg, “Nolan, _please._ ”

Nolan hesitates, his eyes flicking down to where Liam’s fingers are _working_ now, and Theo’s hips are rolling up to meet them—Theo’s leg now draped over Liam’s shoulder, Liam’s eyes golden where he’s watching his own hand move—and then he follows the guiding pressure of Theo’s hand, and settles back down, over Theo’s chest. Theo stares up at him through those same hooded, dark eyes.

But as Nolan watches he flares them. He opens his mouth a little wider and lets it fill with fangs. Nolan feels his breath hitch and he takes the invitation offered; he drops a hand onto the side of Theo’s face and then _drags_ it down, until he has two fingers resting underneath one of Theo’s gold-shining eyes, and his thumb is pressing _just_ up against one of Theo’s upper canines.

He jolts and digs his thumb _harder_ against that sharp point when Theo gets a hand around him, and starts to _stroke._

“Ah,” Nolan gasps, sharp and breathy. His thumb slips as his hips buck, and Nolan sucks in a sharp inhale at the _sting._ But before he can withdraw his hand—reflex and instinct, a swirl of _fear_ in his gut—Theo suddenly twists his head sideways and _bites_ down on either side of Nolan’s thumb, holding it captive. 

Nolan _freezes, arousal_ burning through—burning _off_ —the fear.

Theo drags his tongue up the small cut that his fang had opened up against the pad of Nolan’s thumb. On top of the way that his hand is still working Nolan’s cock, Nolan almost can’t handle the surge of sensation and he half-collapses over Theo, just barely managing to catch himself on a hand right by Theo’s head. His elbow—his whole _arm_ —shakes as he watches Theo’s mouth work. As he _feels_ Theo’s mouth work, his tongue twisting around Nolan’s thumb still trapped between the sharp edges of Theo’s fangs, Nolan’s hips helplessly rocking up into Theo’s grip.

And then Theo suddenly releases his thumb on a sharp cry, his head snapping to the side as his eyes squeeze shut, and Nolan jolts and twists around to look at Liam behind him. 

Liam behind him and still between Theo’s legs, a satisfied smirk on his face as he does something—as he twists his wrist—and Theo cries out again, muffled by the futon mattress that he’d managed to half-bury his mouth against. 

Theo’s hand had stilled on Nolan’s cock, too, but after another second it starts to work again. Nolan gasps and his eyelids flutter, but behind him Liam has slid his fingers free of Theo’s body, and has sat back on his heels as he reaches for the lube packet and gets his cock—hard again, and red, and shining with wetness at the tip—slicked up. Nolan bites back a whimper and turns back to Theo, leaning down to kiss him at the same time that he reaches down to still Theo’s hand.

Theo frowns—Nolan can feel it against his mouth—and digs his head back against the mattress so that he can look quizzically up at Nolan. But Nolan just shakes his head lightly. “I want—” he tries to explain, and then can’t finish.

But he apparently doesn’t need to. Theo _grins,_ slow and molasses-smooth, and opens his hand. He does it only _after_ rubbing the tip of his thumb _right_ under the head of Nolan’s cock, causing him to gasp and fall forward over Theo as sensation bolts up his spine. 

Theo smirks up at him when Nolan tilts his head down to _glare._ There’s a challenge there, something that looks a whole lot like a _promise,_ and Nolan feels his mouth go a little dry as he stares at it. 

But then Theo’s entire expression goes slack as his mouth drops open on a long, low moan, and Nolan twists around to see Liam slowly, _slowly_ pushing into Theo, Theo’s legs spread wide on either side of Liam’s hips and Liam’s hands holding his thighs open, and steady. Nolan looses his own moan, soft and helpless, and pushes himself off of Theo’s chest and to the side.

Liam takes immediate advantage, folding over Theo to kiss him _just_ as he bottoms out; Nolan can tell with the way that Theo’s hips jerk. Liam holds him like that—hands on Theo’s inner thighs to hold him spread wide, his hips pressed flush to Theo’s ass—for a long few seconds as he kisses him deep and _thoroughly,_ and then he turns his head to the side, and slits open his eyes as he looks at Nolan.

His _golden_ eyes. “Yeah?” He double-checks.

Nolan almost can’t answer, not with the desperation in his own gut from his hard— _aching_ cock—and not with the sight of the two of them together, Liam folded over Theo and covering him like he _belongs_ there, Theo with his face and his closed eyes pressed to Liam’s shoulder as he pants, open-mouthed and with these tiny, helpless cries. But.

But: “Yeah,” Nolan manages. 

Liam _grins._

He grins and starts to _move,_ his hips pistoning. He doesn’t start slow and build up. He starts fast and doesn’t _let_ up, each of his thrusts hard enough and powerful enough that they rock Theo up the mattress. 

Hard enough that Theo starts to cry out on the first and then _immediately_ leans forward to clamp his teeth around Liam’s shoulder, muffling it. It’s not a gentle bite, either; Liam hisses and his hips briefly lose their rhythm, and Nolan can see the slightest bitof _red_ staining the place where Theo’s mouth is anchored. _I want to see what it’s like—what it’s_ really _like—when you don’t have to hold back,_ Nolan had told them, and they _aren’t._

It’s _stunning._

It’s more than Nolan could have imagined, Theo meeting Liam thrust for thrust no matter how hard Liam is driving his hips forward. Both of their hands are clawed—Nolan spotting the gleaming tips in the moonlight still filtering in through the window—and they’re not careful—they don’t _have_ to be careful—about where their fingers land, how tightly they clutch; they hold. 

But more than that. _More_ than that:

Liam starts to shift Theo—something innocuous, a new angle—and Theo _snarls._ Nolan doesn’t think it’s intentional—he thinks it’s instinct, both of them clearly riding high on it—but he opens his fanged mouth and he narrows his flared eyes and he _snarls,_ and Liam rears back for half a second before he surges right back forward. 

When _he_ snarls, it’s full and burring and _powerful_ ; enough so that even Nolan finds _himself_ cowering back some, his head reflexively turning to the side. _Baring his throat,_ he realizes. _Submitting._ Something hot squirms in his gut.

But Theo’s reaction puts his to shame. Theo sucks in a sharp breath and his eyes squeeze closed as he tilts his head back, not just baring the side of his throat but baring _all_ of it, the arched stretch of it left vulnerable and exposed for the fangs Liam has hovering just over his Adam’s apple.

And it’s one of the hottest things Nolan has ever seen—he very nearly has to drop a hand to the base of his own cock to drive off the tightening in his gut that very nearly tips him over the edge—but that’s not the part that catches, and holds, Nolan’s attention. It’s not the part that freezes his breath in his chest, even his _heartbeat_ feeling like it quiets specifically to avoid the risk of interrupting as Liam stills, and stares down at Theo, the snarl melting away from his face to be replaced by something almost _wounded_ looking.

“Don’t fight me,” he begs, the fierce expression disappearing from Theo’s face into one of soft, stunned surprise as he does. “Don’t fight me,” Liam repeats, low and desperate and with his voice _cracking_ midway through. “I don’t want to fight you, not anymore. Not for a long time.”

He ducks his head down, and brushes the tip of his nose over Theo’s mouth, the curve of his cheekbone.

“I told you,” he tells Theo, even _Nolan_ able to hear the way his voice seems to _ache_ with sincerity. “I want to fight _with_ you,” Liam says.

He squeezes his eyes closed, and rolls his forehead _hard_ against Theo’s own, and he pleads:

“Fight _with_ me.”

Theo doesn’t respond right away, can’t seem to. He just stares up at Liam, his expression cracked open, and then his hands suddenly come up, and he _clutches_ at Liam’s face. He kisses him hard, and desperately, Liam moaning and tilting his head where Theo seems to want it and _not fighting_ Theo’s grip, and he keeps right on not fighting it until Theo’s fingers gentle—Nolan watching as the white-knuckled press of them relaxes—and only _then_ does he pull back, his eyes roving over Theo’s face.

Theo nods. He keeps nodding, softly but _insistently,_ until Liam sucks in a sharp breath and darts back down to kiss _him._

Liam’s hips start to work again. Theo cries out, but this time it’s soft, and muted, and swallowed by Liam’s mouth. 

Nolan finally feels like _he_ can breathe again, the stale air in his lungs finally shuddering loose of his chest.

It isn’t long before Liam has to break off kissing Theo to bury his face in the side of Theo’s neck, the rhythm of his hips starting to stutter. Still, he raises up the next moment on one hand, his other dropping between his and Theo’s bodies as he takes a hold of Theo’s cock, and starts to stroke. 

Theo lasts one, two, three tight pumps of Liam’s hand, and then he moans and arches and comes, his own hands clutching one at Liam’s shoulder and one in his own hair. 

Liam takes his hand away, and braces _both_ down on either side of Theo’s head, and leans down to press his mouth wetly, _messily,_ to Theo’s as he gives another few, _hard_ thrusts of his hips and then _stills_ with his thighs pressed flush to Theo’s ass. Theo gives a second, weaker moan and brings his arms up to wrap around Liam’s shoulders, Liam collapsing downwards onto him and burying his face once more in Theo’s neck.

Nolan exhales his own shaky sound as quietly as he can, not wanting to interrupt, but it’s a wasted effort: but Liam and Theo are both supernatural, with supernatural senses, and they both jerk and glance over at him when he does. Nolan flushes, feeling unaccountably _embarrassed_ somehow, but then Theo’s lips curl up in a small smile, and Liam’s flicker up into a grin, and Theo reaches out one lazy hand to get a hold of Nolan’s knee. Liam jerks his chin in an unspoken order.

Nolan hesitates, and then moves slowly forward, until he’s kneeling next to them. 

Liam rises up, and then sits back on his heels. The next instant he braces a hand low on Theo’s stomach and carefully pulls out of him, Theo’s breath still hitching regardless. But it gives Liam the freedom to move; to slide sideways until he can press himself up against Nolan’s back. His cock is still softening and Nolan shudders as it brushes against his own ass, and he can _feel it_ as Liam grins against the side of his head. 

It feels like a promise; the second one he’s been made tonight.

But for _now._

Liam drops a hand high on Nolan’s thigh, just a few short inches away from Nolan’s aching cock. On Nolan’s _other_ leg, Theo’s hand is still wrapped around his knee, his thumb stroking and stroking over the sensitive skin there. Nolan shivers, and presses back harder into Liam behind him. Liam drags his hand the rest of the way up Nolan’s thigh, and starts to stroke his thumb smoothly, _suggestively,_ down the sensitive skin of Nolan’s lower belly.

He asks, “You think you’ve made yourself wait long enough?” like he’d caught on to the exact same thing that Theo had.

Nolan flushes, but Theo before and Liam _now_ seem easy, interested, _intrigued_ even, and so Nolan shudders, and widens his knees even further on either side of Liam’s, and says, “ _Please._ ”

It takes less than a minute—Liam stripping his cock fast and tight, Theo’s hand braced at the base—for Nolan to come, his whole _body_ folding over on a high, desperate cry as he does. He moans and shakes his way through it, Liam’s hand never so much as _slowing,_ and has to bite back his own whine as the shivering pleasure starts to edge into _too much,_ though he doesn’t ask—though he’s not sure he _wants_ —Liam to stop.

But Liam _does_ stop, because Theo grabs his wrist, and makes him. Liam gives him a half-assed snarl, his chin hooked over Nolan’s shoulder, but it’s clear his heart’s not in it; he lets Theo drag his hand away. Nolan resists the urge for half a second, and then he gives in and collapses down onto the mattress next to Theo, his whole body still shivering and juddering through the aftershocks. 

It’s only after Liam laughs—light and amused and not malicious in the slightest—and flops down on Nolan’s other side that Nolan realizes that they’ve somehow ended up _right_ back in the places they’d been at the beginning of the night, except now they’re sweaty and flushed and he and Theo at least are a mess. Nolan feels color flood his cheeks, and he buries his face in the mattress below him.

The mattress that he immediately jerks upright and stares in _horror_ at, because: “Oh my god,” he realizes, his eyes fixed on the _McCall house futon_ in the _McCall house basement,_ before they flick up to the ceiling. “They—they would have _heard_ us, wouldn’t—”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence. Theo leans up on an elbow and gets a hold of the back of his neck, pulling Nolan’s face to his in a slow, lingering kiss. “They,” he assures Nolan, the edges of his vowels just ripe and _rounded_ with amusement, “were _equally_ distracted, believe me.”

It takes Nolan a second to fully realize what Theo means, and then his mouth drops open as he does. Something _squirms_ in his gut as he—helplessly—imagines it, his fingers spasming some around the mattress below him. Theo just laughs, and kisses his slack mouth, and then starts encouraging him back down.

It’s only once he’s flat again—on his back, this time—that he realizes that Liam had retrieved one of their shirts—Nolan has no idea _whose_ —and started scrubbing it carelessly over his stomach, and soft cock. He tosses it to Theo next, who cleans up just as quickly as Liam leans over and—and kisses Nolan, his tongue sweeping into Nolan’s mouth. Nolan gets the feeling that he’s seeking out Theo’s taste there, but even once he _must_ have found it all, he keeps right on kissing Nolan.

He kisses him right through Nolan’s jerk as he feels Theo drop the shirt onto his belly, and start cleaning _him_ up. 

Liam pulls away once Theo’s done, and Nolan slits his eyes open in time to see Theo throw the balled-up shirt away somewhere. Nolan stares at him for a few seconds, can’t help it, and then turns his head to do the same to Liam on his other side. But Liam’s in the process of tugging his sweatpants back on—Theo doing the same on his other side—and he just reaches down, and retrieves Nolan’s to toss them to him. Nolan catches them on reflex but doesn’t move to put them on, just keeps watching Liam as he starts to root around at the edge of the mattress.

 _What do I do now?_ Some corner of Nolan’s mind wonders; same question he’d been asking himself earlier and softer-edged now, maybe, but still there. Liam straightens back up, a blanket in his hands. He searches Nolan’s face, his brow furrowing.

He looks behind Nolan to Theo, and he must like whatever he sees there. It must settle him, because he grins, languid and easy, and leans forward to kiss Nolan once more, pressing him back and into the mattress.

“Just go to sleep, Nolan,” he orders, same thing he’d told Nolan to do earlier, only now his voice is as languid and easy as his smile.

He unfolds the blanket over them—all three of them—and settles in on his side, facing Nolan. He lets his eyes slip shut. On Nolan’s other side, Theo lets loose a quiet exhale, almost a _sigh,_ and turns his face into Nolan’s shoulder.

Nolan turns his face up towards the ceiling, and studies the night-dark of it for a long moment.

After a long few seconds, he lets his eyes slip shut.

\---

Theo wakes up the next morning because it’s dawn. It doesn’t matter that he’s in a basement and not in his truck, that there isn’t sunlight streaming in through his windshield and there’s no unnamed deputy tapping on his window to tell him to move along: he still wakes up.

He tries to do it quietly, at least, rolling over onto his back with a furrowed brow but not a sound, but it doesn’t matter. On Nolan’s other side—Nolan still sandwiched in between them, and even more so than when they’d all passed out last night—Liam stirs, and then blinks his eyes slowly open. He looks at Theo.

Theo freezes, and just looks back for a long moment. Neither he nor Liam are bearing any marks from last night, but there’s a bruise up high underneath Nolan’s jaw. Liam had put it there with his mouth, the sight of it wine-red and stark and a complete contrast to the yellowed color of the bruises that _Gabe_ had dug into Nolan’s face a few days ago at the zoo. Last night they’d figured some things out but hadn’t _touched_ a whole lot of others—and had created some more—and Theo exhales out low, and slow, and shoves aside every other half-panicked urge he has in favor of just continuing to look back at Liam.

Finally Liam’s lips flicker, and he jerks his chin up, and out. He carefully untangles himself from the single blanket they’d all been sharing and Nolan’s arms, and then stands. Theo follows, just as soundlessly.

Liam leads him into the bathroom, because upstairs is the rest of the pack and the rest of the _world._ He doesn’t close the door all the way, though, leaving it just slightly cracked. Liam turns to look up at him again once he’s done.

Neither of them are wearing shirts and it adds a whole layer of absurdity on top of everything else. Absurdity and _something else;_ Theo’s fingers twitch against his palms with the urge to touch. Liam just tilts his head.

“Little late to be worried about keeping your hands to yourself, don’t you think?” He observes dryly, and so Theo rolls his eyes and takes Liam’s face in his hands, and walks him slowly backwards until he can press Liam up against the bathroom wall, kissing him all the while. Liam doesn’t protest. He pulls Theo harder _in._

He opens the eyes that he’d let slip shut after a while, and _does_ push Theo back, though not far. His head cocks. “We should head upstairs,” he says, clearly hearing the same things that Theo is as the rest of the house starts to wake up.

“No,” Theo counters, “we should not.” He raises his eyebrows pointedly when Liam squints at him and clarifies, “ _Not_ before we shower.” He jerks his chin backwards, at the basement bathroom’s tiny cubicle shower.

Liam gives him a wry look. “They’re going to know.”

Theo gives him a wry look right back. “There’s knowing, and then there’s rubbing their faces in it.” 

He steps back, or tries to: Liam grabs his hips and stops him. “Join me?” He suggests.

Theo just snorts, and leans down to kiss him. “Considering neither of us are contortionists, there’s no way that’s physically _possible._ ”

He steps back for real this time, pulling Liam off the wall and then spinning him around before pushing him lightly towards the shower. Liam makes a face, but goes.

Theo leaves him to it, exiting the bathroom and pulling the door back shut behind himself. He picks his way back over to the floor-bound futon mattress, and crouches down at the edge of it. “Hey,” he murmurs, reaching forward and lightly shaking Nolan’s shoulder. “Nolan, wake up.”

Nolan blinks himself awake, and Theo can literally _watch_ in real-time as reality crashes back in on him. Confusion as he remembers where he is. Arousal as his eyes flick down to Theo’s bare chest. A _second_ wave of arousal—and enough to make _Theo’s_ breath shudder through his lungs—as he apparently recalls last night.

 _Grief_ as he recalls the _rest_ of last night.

Theo works his jaw, his mouth flooding with reflexive saliva at the tangled mess of Nolan’s scent. Nolan hasn’t moved beyond that first initial lift of his head, and Theo doesn’t try to make him. He doesn’t know how someone like Nolan—someone who hasn’t survived the things that Liam and the rest of the McCall pack has survived; someone who isn’t a _freak science experiment_ —deals with the events of the last several days. He figures silence is probably the safest thing he can offer.

But then Nolan suddenly collapses back flat on his back, and his expression screws up _tight._ Theo has moved before his conscious mind has time to catch up with his body, and winds up on his hands and knees over Nolan, his eyes searching Nolan’s face. Nolan just stares up at him.

“What do I do now?” He asks, quiet and desperate like a _plea._

Theo doesn’t know what to say. Behind him, he hears the bathroom door click open, and he twists around to see Liam come out, wet-haired and with a soft, pinched look on his face; he’d overheard. Theo looks back down at Nolan.

“Start with a shower,” he advises, not unkindly. “And after that…” He trails off, because he has no idea what to say. 

In the end he settles for exhaling out, low and rough, and then offering Nolan a hand up. When Nolan takes it, he hauls both of them up, onto their feet. The blanket falls down between them. Nolan is still looking at him, yellowed bruises on his jaw and one wine-red bruise underneath it; marked and marked and marked.

“And after that, breakfast,” Liam suddenly offers. He meets Theo’s eyes when both Theo and Nolan startle and look back at him, and then switches his attention and looks at Nolan instead. “One thing at a time,” he tells him.

Nolan hesitates for a long second, and then nods. He steps past Theo, heading towards the bathroom. But when he goes to pass Liam, Liam snaps out a hand and drags him to a gentle stop. Nolan startles and looks sideways at him, and Liam slowly lifts a hand—his eyes fixed on Nolan’s face like he’s waiting, _searching_ for any hint of a protest—until he can cup it around Nolan’s jaw, and draw him in to a careful, closed-mouth kiss. 

Nolan’s breath leaves him on a shaky exhale. His shoulders slump, some. The riot of his scent mutes at least a little; at least for the space of that kiss, before Liam pulls away as slowly as he’d leaned in, and gets Nolan moving again with a gentle but _firm_ hand on his back.

He looks at Theo once Nolan has disappeared into the bathroom. _One thing at a time,_ Liam had said. He’d also pulled back on the sweatpants he’d been wearing last night, and he’s _still_ not wearing a shirt, so. A first thing: Theo goes to help him dig out some even _newer_ borrowed clothes for them all to wear from the piles of folded-but-not-put-away laundry in various baskets. 

Upstairs, the rest of the pack is _conscious,_ but saying they’re awake is more of a stretch. The duct tape covering the bullet holes looks washed out in the early morning sunlight, even given the limited amount that’s pouring into the kitchen; the one window still covered with cardboard. Theo follows Liam out of the basement onto the main floor, Nolan at his back, some part of himself already bracing for a lukewarm welcome. 

But their welcome is about as underwhelming as it gets; Scott and the rest barely even acknowledge them, beyond mumbled hellos and pointed fingers towards the last few coffee mugs available in the entire McCall kitchen. _Benign negligence,_ Theo thinks, and orders himself not to question it.

Still, their reprieve lasts only as long as it takes Liam to try and scoot past Malia on his way to the coffee pot, and then her nose wrinkles. She looks sharply from Liam, to Theo, and then to Nolan, and her eyebrows slowly climb as her eyes slowly widen. Theo can feel Nolan stiffening at his side. He prepares his tongue to say something cutting; incisive.

But Malia just looks away from them, and back towards Liam, and tells him, “We used the last of the coffee creamer.”

Liam makes a scalded-cat noise of complaint. Stiles—draped over the armchair in the living room like he’d _melted_ there, Mason and Corey still holding court on the couch—sing-songs, “You snooze, you lose!”

Theo glances at Nolan when he sees Nolan shoot him a look out of the corner of his eye. But then he has to jump and look up, because Liam is calling, “Theo,” and wiggling an empty coffee mug in his direction. 

“C’mon,” he tells Nolan quietly, and shepherds him in front of himself with a hand on Nolan’s back.

He only notices Derek’s eyes following the movement _after._ Like Malia he doesn’t say anything, but his attention flicks over to Liam afterwards. His expression stays level, very nearly _neutral,_ but Theo can see the slight narrowing of his eyes. 

And then Liam is offering him a mug of coffee. The look on his face says he’d noticed the look on Derek’s, and that—unspoken or not—he hadn’t missed Malia’s reaction, either. _I guess we’re going to find out whether you’ll fight for me after all,_ Theo had said to Liam last night, and Liam had answered, _I guess we will._

He accepts the mug.

Breakfast gets increasingly chaotic as time rolls on, helped _not at all_ by the Sheriff’s and Parrish’s arrival with what looks like the entire current stock of one of Beacon Hills fast food chain’s breakfast menus stuffed into several armful’s worth of white paper bags. “My hero,” Ms. McCall greets, but in addition to sounding dry she also sounds like she genuinely _means it._ Theo just leans back against the kitchen counter when Liam jumps up to sit on it, Nolan wedged between him and the fridge and close enough that when he shifts to drink his coffee—to eat the paper-wrapped breakfast sandwich that Liam lobs over Theo’s head towards him—his shoulder and arm press into Theo’s back. 

Theo doesn’t shift away.

He _does_ eventually go find Nolan, however, after Nolan disappears for five, ten, fifteen minutes, originally mumbling something about _being right back_. Liam watches as Theo goes but doesn’t move to follow.

Not yet anyway.

Nolan is out on the front porch. They’re in California, sure, but it’s _Northern_ California _,_ and it’s winter, and Nolan is shivering, the thin cotton shirt Liam had found him to wear clearly insufficient against the cold. Theo tosses him the jacket he’d snagged on his way out the front door. It’s Liam’s, which Nolan clearly realizes. He hesitates before putting it on, but _burrows_ into it once he has. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“You know what you’re apologizing for this time?” Theo wonders, not _exactly_ unkindly.

Nolan makes a rough, humorless sound. “What _aren’t_ I apologizing for?” He answers, his eyes on the street beyond the McCall front yard; the middle distance. 

Theo exhales out a low breath, and picks his way forward until he can lean his elbows on the porch railing, just a few inches away from where Nolan is standing with his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He’d _already_ smelled like himself and Liam and Theo all bundled up together—no way to avoid that, even with the shower—but in Liam’s jacket it becomes all the stronger. Theo finds himself taking deep drags of the scent. 

“What do I do now?” Nolan says, the same thing he’d said in the basement in that same near-plea. When Theo looks over at him, Nolan is already watching him. There’s something desperate, something _hesitant_ on his face, and Theo doesn’t know what it is, where it’s coming from, until Nolan wonders, halting: “What did—what did _you_ do?”

Theo goes _rigid,_ and stares at him. He’d wonder what the _hell_ Nolan is talking about, except that Nolan had _been there_ over the last several days each and every time someone decided to drag Theo’s past out into the light. Mason in the tunnels. Gabe at the zoo. 

Theo, himself, bargaining his way out of that basement.

He forces himself to relax, and shakes his head. “Don’t follow my example.”

“Why not?” Liam suddenly says, startling both Theo and Nolan into twisting around to look at him. He’s leaned against the open front door, but as Theo and Nolan both watch he finishes stepping through it, and closes it behind himself. He meets Theo’s gaze head-on as he argues, “I think you pulled it off at the end there, anyway.”

Theo can’t help the burn—and it _is_ a burn, as much something twisting and painful as it is anything else—of reluctant amusement in his chest. He tells Liam, “You and your alpha are both a little pathologically forgiving.”

Liam just shrugs, dismissing the criticism—if that’s how Theo had even meant it, and even _he_ isn’t sure—without denying it. He crosses his arms over his chest— _he’s_ just wearing a thin shirt, too—and comes to lean against the railing on Nolan’s other side. He tilts his head up to look at Nolan once he’s there.

He says, “Ask _me_ what I’m going to do now.”

Nolan trades a look with Theo, who just raises his eyebrows in a clueless gesture. Nolan hesitates, biting his lip, and then he twists around to look at Liam. “What are...what are _you_ going to do now?”

Liam just tips his chin at—the town beyond the quiet suburban neighborhood they’re sitting in, the McCall house’s recent brush with automatic gunfire notwithstanding. “I’m going to help Scott and the rest of the pack, and the rest of the _town,_ pick up the pieces, and rebuild whatever can be rebuilt.”

Theo feels his breath catch. He _stares_ at Liam when Liam glances over at him. But then Liam’s eyes flick up, to Nolan, because Nolan quietly wonders:

“What about what can’t be?”

Liam hums, and lets his gaze drift back over the neighborhood; the town; the horizon. 

He says, “We build something new.”

He looks back at Nolan. He looks back at _Theo_. His lips flicker.

“What do you think?” He wonders, and that _you_ encompasses more than Nolan, or Theo, separately; he means them both. “You want to stick around and help?”

Nolan stares at him, and then he twists around to look at Theo. Theo meets his eyes, and then drops them to meet Liam’s, instead. Liam is already looking back, his mouth curling up into an even _wider_ smirk, like he already had Theo’s answer, and he likes it. And he _does_ have Theo’s answer, Theo supposes, but he nods anyway; sealing the deal. Liam’s mouth finishes splitting into an open-mouthed grin, the corners of his eyes crinkling up.

And that’s _before_ Nolan looks back at him—Liam jerking and flicking his gaze up to meet Nolan’s—and Nolan tells him, “Yeah.”

Nolan looks out at the neighborhood, the town, the _horizon,_ just like Liam had, his arms and chest still bundled up in Liam’s jacket that Theo had tossed to him and Liam and Theo on either side of him, and he says:

“Yeah, I think I would.”

**Author's Note:**

> Nolan/Gabe content warning: During the zoo scene, Gabe grabs Nolan's face so hard that he leaves thumbprint bruises all along his jaw.
> 
> All feedback loved! If you liked, please consider a comment or a [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/638028172229754880/sea-glass-mirror-lost-in-the-gambling-prairie)!


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